


some gathered together in bands

by Go0se



Series: Origin Story [1]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: - we die like most of the Fabulous Killjoys crew, Battery City, Better Living Industries, Drug Withdrawal, Family Feels, Feelings Jams, Gen, Grief/Mourning, How We Got Here, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Medication, Not Beta Read, Past Violence, Pre-Canon, Sisters, Temporary Child Abandonment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2020-10-26 07:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20738366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: Honey Handgrenade doesn't remember much, now, of her life before she was in the Fabulous crew. Kobra says that that happens sometimes because your mind is trying to heal itself, like a scab on your thoughts. You don't want to pick at it while what's underneath is still gooey and raw.That's fair, Honey thinks. Shiny. But some of it wasn't so bad.Stories from the youngest Fabulous killjoy's life before she joined the gang, and people she met along the way.





	1. The City

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Outside The Wall' by Pink Floyd, and all in lowcaps because that's what the song sounds like.
> 
> Originally, waaaaaaaaaay back now, the series this belongs to was going to start with Grace in Battery City with her mom and dad and sister, and then catalogue her move out to the desert with her mom and Hope, then to some other zonerunners with Hope, and then finally to the Fabulous four killjoys on her own. I wrote enough that, at this point, I know I'm never going to polish all of it up satisfactorily. This fic is a compromise. I'm just taking the parts I like best and dropkicking and/or placing gently here. There'll be so many headcanons, everywhere, all the time. Hopefully none of it's too confusing; but I'm happy to answer any questions. Please forgive the typos which are inevitably in here, I haven't looked at some of these in (not kidding) five years and definitely missed at least a few.  
Thank you:  
To all my friends; in particular Syrup for listening to my excited rambling, and Rose for helping me beta pieces of this ages ago.  
As ever, to the band, for everything.  
And to you, for reading. I hope you enjoy.
> 
> /

_“Dreaming, I was only dreaming, of another place and time where my family’s from.”_  
–[‘Before The Lobotomy’](https://youtu.be/wzJf2PPbJeQ), by Green Day

* * *

**1\. Home**

  
If anyone asked Grace, she’d be happy to tell them all about herself.  
  
Grace was nine years old. She lived with her mother, father, and little sister in Apartment D-39 of the Vine building, on Avenue 13, in the south-western quarter of the gleaming metropolis all of them called their home. She had a healthy eagerness to learn balanced with a equally healthy respect for authority and ability to follow directions. She knew her multiplication tables up to 3, could tell you the difference between analog and digital time, and understood that different medications fixed everything anyone had wrong with them. She was proud to be a member of Battery City. Her father’s name was Peter, her mother’s name was Gloria, and her little sister was called Hope.  
  
Grace was a Good Kid. Hope was a Good Kid too.  
They each had two matching prescriptions: Calm and Serene. Grace had a third one, ‘Attentive’. Both girls took Serene with their parents at the breakfast table, right before having a healthy family meal. (It was good to have healthy family connections, and a healthy diet.) ‘Serene’ promoted their physical vitality and emotional well-being. All day, the two girls would smile, and their parents would smile too. (It was good to smile.)

Grace and Hope went to school together in the Primary Education Centre, on Avenue 1, in the Central quarter of the gleaming metropolis they called home. They arrived precisely at 8:30 in the morning, along with all of the other kids, and filed into their respective classrooms. Sometimes they would wave goodbye to each other as they passed in the hallway.  
At 8:45a.m., after roll call and book-sort, Grace and her classmates would carefully remove the lids of their ‘Attentive’ bottles and take three smooth white pills that were square in shape. The pills helped them concentrate and metabolize information far quicker and more efficiently, far Better, than they would on their own. This would prepare them for their future of working in one of the great jobs that the City had to offer, which would secure them a place in the fabric of Better life.

At 3:30pm. exactly, a buzzer would sound in the school to signal that their productive day of learning and correctly following directions was complete. Both girls would follow her classmates out through the hallways and doors and into the light of the Sun™; they’d meet at the wide white lines that distinguished the Education Centre property from public road, and they’d link hands and walk the two neat blocks to the sleek silver shuttle, which would take them home.

After Grace and Hope had stepped off the gleaming silver shuttle and onto the conveyor-sidewalk into the Vine, and taken the stairs all the way up, up, up to the nineteenth floor (it was good to have moderate to vigorous physical activities at least thirty minutes a day), they would swallow the salt-tinged globe of ‘Calm’ with a simple drink of water, under the watchful gazes of Mama and Papa. Calm was still medicine, but it was more like a vitamin than the other two prescriptions that they had. It helped ease them down into relaxation and contemplation, perfect for the evening.  
After supper the whole family would all sit together in front of the Happiness-Regulated TV set, and enjoy a educational evening watching Fact News, or undergoing the weekly thought-adjustment process. At Bed Time, the lights in their apartment would flick off just as the ones out on the streets would flick on. Both parents would get up from the couch, take one of their daughters by the hand and tuck her into bed in her own room. They would kiss her on her forehead or cheek, pat her hair and then wait by the doorway until Calm, finally, slid its time-lapsed way into the girl's’ bloodstream and made her eyes slide shut.

Grace didn’t know what her parents did after she fell asleep, but she knew that they were always in the kitchen when she got up, and in the living room when she got home, and ready with new prescriptions when hers were running low. During the day, she knew that they helped maintain the City the same way she and Hope would help maintain the City when they grew up. (She wanted nothing more than to grow up.)

Grace had a Good Life. She knew this.  
Her dreams were always empty and clean.

*

Then, there was a day when Grace and Hope opened the door to the apartment at precisely 4:05p.m., smiling happily at the thought of another Perfect Family Evening, to find that neither their mother or father were home.

  
The two girls stood in the doorway of the apartment for a long time, minds blank. This had never happened before. It wasn’t supposed to happen. They were supposed to come in from school and take their pills together and enjoy a healthy family Meal and a healthy family TV-watching-session and then have their parents tuck them into bed. Their parents had never not been there when the girls’ had needed them.

They were still holding hands; Grace, who was both older and taller, looked down when she felt Hope tug. The five-year-old had tears in her eyes; Grace blinked and wiped her sister’s face with her sleeve. “Don’t cry,” she said. “They have to come home soon.”

“What do we _do_,” Hope asked, tugging on Grace’s hand again. More tears welled up.

Grace swallowed.

Part of her just wanted to wait. (They _had _to come home, and soon.) But the MouseKat watch that was ticking away on her wrist told her it was already 4:27. That was (Attentiveness hummed in her brain) almost a full half-hour after they were both supposed to have a happy Meal and take their prescriptions. It was bad to be late for your medication, _really _bad.  
Mama was the one who cooked the Meal; Mama had always been the one to cook the Meal. But now she wasn’t here.  
  
Beside her, her little sister sniffled. She had to get Hope food, and their medication.  
Grace made herself stand straighter, not wanting to slouch like she was still in Primary Education. It would be alright. She wasn’t their mom, but she was a Executive Pre-Pre-Professional Person; she could handle boiling some water and opening bottles.

“It's okay,” Grace said, squeezing Hope’s hand. She walked with her into the apartment, shutting the door firmly behind them.

It was weird making the Meal without Mama watching to make sure she didn’t burn herself or drop anything, but Grace managed. While Hope sat in a chair and swung her legs idly, the just-turned-nine year old poured the food into bowls and water into cups, and set them on the table.  
Up on the top kitchen shelf, the smooth white bottles of their medication were set in a line, in the same place they always were. Grace stared at them, then shook her head and took the two small ones labelled ‘Calm’ into her hand. She climbed off the chair she’d used as a stool and set them on the table, too.

Hope looked up at her with big eyes as she measured out precisely one tablet for each of them. The Attentiveness in Grace’s system made her notice how light the bottles were getting, and that Hope had tapped her foot against the leg of the chair thirty-three times since she'd sat down. She also noticed that it was now 4:39, a_ full half-hour_ after their Calm was supposed to be taken. Half an hour in which their parents hadn’t come home. She felt sick and jittery with how wrong all of it was. Her hands shook as she set the pills down beside their bowls.

Hope apparently wasn’t bothered by any of it. The five-year-old took a tablet of Calm and popped it into her mouth, swallowing it in one gulp. It took her three and a half more gulps of cool water to wash it down.

Grace moved a chair beside Hope and mirrored her actions. The moment she tasted the familiar salt she relaxed, could feel her brain slowing down to its normal pace. She turned a bit in her seat and smiled at her sister (it was good to smile). Hope looked up and smiled back, familiarly, all of her tiny white teeth visible.

They ate their meal together, on the same side of the small square table. If they didn’t listen too hard or look up it was easy to imagine that they weren’t alone.

After dinner, Grace and Hope left their dishes on the table and went over to sit in front of the television set, which Grace switched on using the small panel set into the wall next to the monitor. The friendly white light filled the living room. Both girls relaxed.

And then Bed Time came around, with no one to tuck them in.

Over their time watching Fact News, Hope had curled up against Grace’s side on the middle of the couch. Grace had casually leaned into her, both of them subconsciously leaving enough room for their parents to sit down beside them. After the TV-Woman had made her friendly, nightly Good Bye and the set had switched itself off (at the same time as all the other day-lights in the apartment), the girls still sat there in the dark.  
The lights outside on the street had been on for a length of time that Grace couldn’t calculate (the Attentiveness finally having seeped from her brain) when she realised that her and her sister were waiting, out of sheer force of habit, for something that wasn’t going to happen.  
But you couldn’t just stay in the living room of your apartment the whole night. Every part of a Battery City Citizen’s life was carefully calibrated to meet all that Citizen’s would need; every room in their apartments had been designed specifically to support the activity done in that room. You couldn’t just _sleep _in the living room. It wasn’t good for you.  
With this in mind, Grace gently shook her sister awake. “We have to go to bed,” she said.

Hope’s mouth seemed to wobble for a second. “Can I stay in your room?” She asked.  
Grace immediately put her hand on Hope’s forehead, lips pursed worriedly, like their mother did. No one in the City got sick much, but when Hope did, she was clingy.

But she squirmed away, shaking her head. “'m not sick,” she said. “Just… I don’t want to be by myself.”

(It wasn’t good to spend too much time alone.) Grace sighed. “Okay. Come on.”

She pulled Hope up off the couch and they made their way through the dark of the apartment to the older girl’s room. Hope sat down on the edge of Grace’s bed and swung her short legs back and forth while she watched her sister root through the closet for the single pair of extra blankets she had.  
(Each person that was old enough to sleep through the night in their own bed was allotted two blankets, sheets, and pillowcases, to be used on one mattress and one pillow. The blankets were to be washed once a week, along with clothing, and during the wash-day they were to be switched out with the other pair, which would be used until the next week. It was good to sleep warmly, and to keep clean, and to not have more things than you needed.)

Hope smiled up at Grace when the older girl dumped the extra bedclothes on her mattress. The five-year-olds eyes were getting bleary, and her movements as she climbed onto the bed and under the blankets were sluggish; Calmness was starting to work its way through her.  
It was time, after all. Grace’s own eyes felt heavy, and the familiar desire to just _stay still _seeped into her arms and legs. All of it was familiar, but strange: all other nights, when she’d been lying down in bed with her parents watching protectively from the doorway, Calmness had been a comforting feeling, but now that she was standing up and past her bedtime and _alone _(except for Hope), it… felt different. Cold.

“Warm,” Grace said out loud, and she climbed under the blankets beside her sister, who had now basically formed a cocoon.  
Hope rolled over and looked at her with big eyes, but Grace just shook her head. Her curls fell in her face and she spat them out, unimpressed.  
Hope let out a small, tired giggle. Her head was nodding, but she still seemed resistant to actually falling asleep.  
Grace looked at her, trying to think through the fog in her brain, and then something clicked. “Go to sleep, little one,” she said quietly, repeating what her parents repeated night after night. “Go to sleep and sleep well. A good day starts tomorrow.”

Hope sighed contentedly and finally closed her little eyes.

Grace wiggled further down the mattress, sticking one of her feet out from the bottom of the blanket. She rolled back onto her back and stared at the ceiling, as she always did.  
She remembered her mama standing over her with a soft smile on her face, mouthing the words Grace had just told Hope. The nine-year-old sighed contentedly, too, and her eyes slid shut.

  
*

  
Later-- she didn’t know how much later-- Grace was woken up by a sound.

For a second she didn’t understand why she was awake. The ceiling above her was still unlit, the door open to the rest of the apartment showing it was still dark. And the Calm from dinner hadn’t left her system yet; holding her eyes open _hurt. _She should be asleep. Why wasn’t she asleep?

Hope was beside her still, breathing peacefully. Grace let her eyes close, and relief flooded her. It felt good to sleep; it _was _good to sleep…

And then the sound came again: splashing water, and something she hadn’t heard the first time, a hacking sound, like someone didn’t have enough air to breathe.

She opened her eyes and turned her head toward the still open door, alarm pricking her brain. Then Grace blinked. There was a light in the hallway. But there shouldn’t have been-- the only lights that were in the apartment after Bed Time were clocks, and tiny nightlights set into the baseboards so no one would bump their feet. The only light that you could flip on was the one in the bathroom…

Grace’s Calm mind struggled with that thought for a few seconds, and then the nine-year-old’s eyes widened in the dark.

It took her a full thirty seconds to push off the blankets she’d curled herself up in, and when her feet hit the floor they were so unsteady she almost fell. Walking from her bed to the door and from the door to the other end of the hallway seemed to take forever; each step sent what felt like sparks up her legs, and they _hurt_. Her eyes watered and ached just from staying open. She could barely see anything except for her own hand, steadying against the wall, and the light from the bathroom that she was pushing herself toward.  
Finally, she turned the corner into the bathroom, clutching the doorway for support. Even though she’d had a few minutes (hours, it seemed like—why had time gone so stretchy now?) to get used to the light, she still had to squint at all the shining metal and porcelain and glittering glass bottles. “Mama?”

The horrible hacking sound came again, followed quickly by splashing water and a smell that made Grace take a half-step back, instinctively covering her nose and mouth with her hand.

Her mother was sitting on the floor, hunched over the toilet. Her nice shoes were sitting haphazardly beside her, on top of the other; her left one was still half on her foot, and there was something sticky-looking and dark on her heel. Mama’s hair was clean and sleek but some of it hung in her face, limp, like she’d been sweating except that there were gross-looking chunks there, too. Her hands were sharp, twisted things on the edge of the bowl. She spat into the water, then turned her head toward Grace.

The nine-year-old took another half-step backward in shock: her mama had tears running down her cheeks, smearing her make-up and dripping onto her nice work-dress-suit, which was already creased and spotted with water with how the woman had been sitting on the floor. Never in Grace’s life had she seen adult look like that; it was _wrong. _ Adults didn’t get dirty, they didn’t cry. But even as she watched, her mama’s eyes glittered with more tears.

They stayed there for a long instant, neither of them saying anything, until suddenly her mama’s back spasmed and she hunched over again, hacking. Her voice almost sounded like a siren.

It was then that Grace finally understood what was happening. “Oh,” she said, out loud. “You’re sick.”

She let go of the doorway and walked (still a bit unsteadily) over to her mama, rubbed circles on her shoulder like Mama always did when Hope or Grace herself got sick. “I’ll get the nurse,” she promised. “I’ll get Mrs. Earle. Then she’ll come and give you something and you’ll be better again.” It was what they had always done, Grace’s parents, when Grace or Hope had been sick enough to throw up. Sickness only ever lasted a few days at the very most; enough time for the sick person to actually show signs of being ill. And then someone like Mrs. Earle came, and gave them a different pill than their normal ones, and the person was good again. (The Industry put people like Mrs. Earle in every apartment building and school, so everyone could be Better really fast if something ever made them sick.)

Grace nodded to herself. The fog in her brain had started to clear, and her arms felt lighter than they had been. She wasn’t supposed to go out after Bed Time, even if it was just down the stairs, but this was an emergency. Mrs. Earle would understand, and then Mama would be better, and she could tell Grace when Papa was coming home.

She reached for the toilet paper and ripped off a piece, passing it to her mama over her shoulder. “Otherwise you'll get your sparkles all gross,” she said. Her mama's rings were still on her hand, after all.  
The woman took the paper and wiped off her mouth, still shuddering from the effort of throwing up so much. Grace rubbed her back one more time, then turned toward the door--- and then her mother caught her hand.

Grace stilled, turned around again.

Her mama smiled, even though it looked _wrong _with the woman’s still-wet hair hanging in her face and her eyes wet and her make-up messed up and dripping. “Hey,” she said. Her voice was lower than normal, and she winced like it hurt for her to talk. “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

“You’re sick, Mama,” Grace said. Her voice shook a bit and she wasn’t sure why. “I’m going to go get Mrs. Earle, she’ll make you better, I prom--”

“No, sweetie, you can’t,” her mother interrupted. She was shaking her head side to side, violently, like a dog shaking itself off after a nap. Then she paused for a second, and very suddenly pulled Grace down into a hug.

Grace winced a bit as her kneecaps hit the bare floor but then threw her arms around her mother’s neck, hugging back. “You were gone,” she said into her mama’s hair. “Where’d you go? Was Papa with you? Why weren’t you home?” But there was no answer.

After a moment her mama let go and Grace stood up again (it was polite to stand up in front of your elders, and good to be polite).

Grace’s mother remained on the floor for a second, looking up at her. The woman’s eyes were shining again. Slowly she pushed herself up, until her and Grace were eye-to-eye. She smiled gently and cradled her daughters face in her hands. “Grace and beauty,” her mama said, wiping the nine-year-olds hair back from her face.

It was an old gesture, a comforting one, and even with all the weirdness and _tired _still in her brain Grace relaxed. _Calm. Safe. _She leaned toward her mother and let her eyes close. “Mama, we should go get the nurse.”

  
One of Grace’s curls tugged lightly and the nine-year-old opened her eyes. Her mama was looking at her, still smiling. “I know,” she said. “But listen to me, sweetheart.” And the woman paused for a second, looking away, biting her lip. She inhaled like she was nervous, and then let it out, “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mama,” Grace answered, blinking. Grace knew she was loved. It was good for families to love each other. Of course her mama loved her.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” And Grace did. It was good to trust your fellow citizens, and her Mama had always taken care of her; her Papa too. But why was she asking her _now_?

Her mama blinked her shiny eyes, and a tear slid down her cheek again, bringing a trickle of mascara with it. “Good,” She said, and then repeated it, and then kissed Grace’s forehead . “Now. Listen to me. Go get your sister. And your coat, and your shoes, and-- and anything else that you love very much. But only enough to fit into one bag, okay? We’re… going out. And we’re not going to come back for a while.”

The air-scrubbers in the bathroom kicked on, inhaling the deadening smell of vomit and exhaling something sharp-smelling that Grace had never noticed before. They were leaving? “… mama?” She asked, her voice very small.

The woman smiled at her again, even though her shoulders had started to shake. She kept brushing the curls off Grace’s forehead. “Just trust me, baby. Go.”

* * *

**2\. Leaving**

There wasn’t an official _rule _that no one was allowed outside of their apartment after Bed Time—Grace knew, because if there was, someone would have told her already--- but still, it felt bizarre and _wrong_ to walk down the silent, darkened hallway, taking care not to wake anyone up. The _wrongness _was even stronger outside, when instead of going left onto the main street like they always did Mama pulled Grace and Hope down the back lane by their building. Boys that Grace knew from school would play soccer here, sometimes; but all of them were in bed. Like they should be. The nine-year-old clutched her mother’s hand on her left, and impatiently pulled Hope forward with her right; the younger girl was lagging behind, open-mouthed. She shouldn’t be _staring _at everything so much; it was impolite to stare, at all, even at buildings. Everything was so _wrong._

Grace felt the wrongness like an itch at the base of her neck; like her fingertips were on fire; like her eyes were slowly being squeezed out of her head. But it was bad to question your parents. And even beside that—this was her _mother_. She’d never hurt or caused hurt to Grace, to Hope either. The pain was probably just her being over-tired. So the nine-year-old didn't say a word. Instead she made sure Hope’s chubby fingers didn’t leave her wrist.

The City was quiet and mostly dark, at night; like their apartment but huge. Every fast footstep of theirs seemed to echo forever. The only lights Grace could see stretched high above them, making the air glow orange. Grace held tight to her Mama’s hand on her left, and her sister’s on her right.  
Hope had been awake when she’d gone in to get her, and now she was staring up at everything, her mouth open in awe. She kept almost spinning on her heel, cracking her neck to look up at some new and fascinating thing. More than a few times Grace had to grab her under her armpit as they walked, just to stop the five-year-old from falling.

As their mama had insisted, both girls only packed a satchel each; Grace had filled her own up and then helped Hope with hers. They swung back and forth at their sides, to the rhythm of their steps.

Mama had packed her own bag. At the apartment, Grace and Hope had sat on their parents' bed, watching her pick and choose things. Three bowls; all the bottled water from the fridge; a set of clothes for her; a blanket; three pencils; fourteen packs of Meal; a second set of clothes for each of them, the girls; a lighter; the Self-Phone; a hairbrush; make-up; her perfume. And all the time, that weird shininess never left her eyes.  
Now that they were outside, their mama stared up ahead, her grip just as tight on Grace’s hand. It was like she was running from something, but there wasn’t anyone behind them.

The first time they passed the twinkling screen of a Safety Camera, both Hope and Grace grinned up at it and waved to the friendly engineers they’d learned in school were sitting behind the glass screen, because it was good to be friendly to friendly people; but their mama grabbed both of their arms and tugged them along.  
When they were a few streets away, she’d turned and knelt so that they were face to face again. “You have to keep your head down, okay?” She said, urgently, holding both of their faces. “You can’t draw attention to yourself. Promise me. And we all have to be quiet. Okay?”  
They promised.  
After that, Grace studied her shoes and kept her shoulders up near her ears, and neither she or Hope said anything.

They were taking corners and side-streets that Grace didn’t recognize, even from trips to her parent’s workplace when she’d been really small. The City around them was as friendly as ever, with its tall gleaming towers and perfectly paved grey roads, but their shadows made flickering shapes on the concrete, and something dark about them whispered in Grace’s mind.  
She didn’t know a word for what she was feeling just then; tired and cold all over, but especially on the back of her neck, and twitchy; she kept wanting to look over her shoulder just to check that nothing was following them. And someone _should _be following them. Shouldn't they? This-- something about this-- it didn't seem right. She found herself hoping that a policeman would come over and talk to them, ask her mama where she was taking them.  
But somehow, they never ran into a policemen. Grace didn't understand; policemen were there to help people, patrolling all night every night so they could be close to a house in case someone got hurt, or worse, if someone hurt someone else on purpose. And yet, the three of them never even heard a cycle. Where were all the police? Had something gone wrong?  
The only person there that could answer was Grace’s mother, but she was the one who had brought them out here, and she didn't want to talk right now. Her mama would never hurt them. So if they were leaving with her, it had to be okay. It had to be.

The ground started to slant under their feet, getting steeper and steeper. Grace held tightly onto Hope’s hand in case she fell. The little one had enough trouble not tripping over her shoes when the ground was perfectly flat (as it always was, the City kept all pedestrian and work-paths level and clean). She didn't want to slow them down, wherever they were going.  
Grace had_ never_ seen this place before. She tugged on her mama’s hand.  
She looked down. “Tunnels,” she whispered, before Grace had even opened her mouth.

They kept walking, through the back door of a parking garage and then into some kind of empty building, past long hallways. The cameras on the walls must have seen them pass, even with their heads down. Mama kept pulling to go faster until the three of them were almost running.

Grace’s feet were sore and her hands were sweaty (though she knew the City air was a Balmy 21*Celsius, like Fact News said it always was). When she turned back to look at her sister, Hope wasn't looking too good either. “Mama,” Grace said. “Mama, I’m tired.”  
It wasn’t good to complain, especially not to grown-ups, but it was good to get a healthy amount of sleep, especially if you’re only a kid; and Grace was okay, really, but, but Hope needed to rest.

She wasn’t expecting an answer, not after all the minutes walking in silence, but her mama looked down and nodded, squeezing her hand. “I know you are,” Mama said. “I am too. We just have to go a bit farther, okay?”

“Where are we going?” Hope asked, her voice drawn.

Grace shushed her sister. “That’s _rude_,” she muttered.

“It’s fine,” Mama said to Grace, and then to Hope: “We’re going outside.”

Grace frowned. “But, Mama, we just were outside.” Were they going back home?

“I mean _Outside_,” their mother said, saying the word the way people said City, or Medications. “Out of the city. I—I borrow cars, sometimes, when I’m working. We’re taking one into the desert, and--”

Grace stopped walking, clinging to her mother’s hand until she was forced to stop walking, too.  
Hope bumped into Grace once, and then twice, trying to nudge her forward, but Grace didn’t budge. Nothing was making sense. But things _had _to make sense. “But there’s nothing out there,” she told her mother, who was looking down at her with a expression Grace didn’t recognize. “In the desert, it’s all just _sand _and old roads, and—and bad stuff. Radiation,” she added, remembering lessons on old wars (that the Industry prevented from ever happening again). “We can’t just go _out _there, Mama, we_ can’t_.”

“We are,” Mama said firmly. “And we’re going now.”

“But--”

“_Listen._” Mama crouched down in a way that ladies weren’t supposed to, one knee on the ground and her skirt stretched tight over her thighs, pockets gaping open. She took Grace’s face in her hands. Her voice was level and calm but her eyes were shiny again like in the bathroom except this time it was Grace who felt sick.  
Hope pressed against her side and she squeezed her sister’s hand, thinking _it’s okay, it’ll be okay. _  
“Listen, baby,” their mother said to Grace again, smoothing her curly hair out of her face. “There’s more out there than you think, more than people are telling you. I’ve _been _Outside. During my work,” she continued when Grace opened her mouth to ask _when_. “And I know the way. And we have to _go, _okay, sweetheart? Trust me. Trust your mother.”

“I do trust you,” Grace said, the words spilling out her mouth. Her eyes started to sting and she had to blink to see. “Of course I do. It’s Good to trust your family.”

Her mama smiled, but it seemed like there was something wrong with it. "Then do what I tell you."

Grace didn’t understand, but she followed her when she started walking again.

They moved quickly. Mama led them through a maze of doors in flat, concrete walls, flashing her brightest smile and ID card at various vendors as they passed, moving quickly to something that looked like a parking lot except it was dark at all ends and above, where every parking lot Grace had ever seen was open-air.  
The car she chose was grey and sleek, like most cars in the City. Grace and Hope hadn’t ever ridden in one before, they'd always used the shuttle to get where they needed to go, but they’d seen them speeding by on the streets and had loved the whisper the tires made on the asphalt.  
Their mama opened a door for them and they climbed in. Inside the seats and roof were covered in something soft, which smelled the same as the bathroom fresheners at Primary. (Different from the ones at home, which smelled of warm spices.) It was like being in a very small shuttle, except everything was so quiet all the girls could hear was their own breathing, and the lights set into the ceiling shut off when their mama shut the driver's door.

Grace and Hope sat quietly in the backseat, still clutching each other’s hands. They watched without saying a word as their mama spent a few minutes fiddling with something on the steering wheel that they couldn’t see, until whatever it was came apart with a bad-sounding _crunch _and their mama let out a soft “ha” of victory.  
She opened the door to drop whatever the thing was on the pavement, and in the brief light Grace could see the nail filer that her mama always used clutched tight in the woman’s hand, and blood trickling out from her fingernails.

Grace felt sick and scared as the door slammed and they were in the dark again. She pushed closer to Hope, who had sat back against the seat and tucked her legs near her chest.

“Seatbelts, girls,” Mama said as she did something that made the car’s engine come to life. Her voice was normal, as if they weren’t stealing a car in the middle of the night to go Outside into _nothing_, as if Grace hadn’t been pulled out of her sleep and gone into the bathroom to find her crying and being sick into the toilet_. _Still, she was their mom.  
Both of the girls pulled the plastic belts down and then buckled them across their hips into the locks that were set into tiny wells at the corner of the seats. It felt uncomfortable. Grace pulled at the shoulder strap, frowning.  
But then the car started moving, and she was grateful for it. The seats weren't close to the floor like in the shuttle; her feet weren’t touching anything, and it felt like being dizzy. She mimicked her sister and pulled her knees up, mentally apologizing to whoever the car actually belonged to for putting shoe-marks on the seat.

Hope leaned into her. Instinctively, Grace angled her shoulders so her sister could rest her forehead. Outside the windows the world was speeding up. Grace felt weird, like the air was pushing her back against the seat. Tiny white lights blurred past the glass, moving so fast they were like streaks. Other than that the windows were jet-black.  
Seeing but not seeing scared her, so she tried to focus on the lights. She watched until they burned into her eyes.  
  
After a while everything grew heavy, and it seemed like her and her sister and her mother were all spinning, not touching the car or anything except the dark. The tiny white lights were all beautiful stars, like the sun had been once Before, but then it got too dangerous to live out under so BLI had built the Sun™ to light up the sky in the EcoDome, so everyone would be happy and safe, always smiling, and Grace didn’t understand why they were leaving, but her body felt heavier and heavier. She let her head slip gently onto the warm smell of her sister’s hair as everything started to fade.

  
-

_-End of 'Pt I: The City'-_


	2. The Desert I - II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional tags added this chapter: Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, Temporary Child Abandonment, Past Violence, Grief/Mourning, and (helpfully) Feelings Jams.  
More specific warnings include: talking about brainwashing, children feeling pressured to parent others, slight unsanitary in re: bathroom breaks when there aren't actual bathrooms (road trips!), and, especially in the second half, the death of a loved one.  
Please mind your step.  
~

“_The sun flickered like a television set,  
__bright flashes of a warning sign!  
__Vapid shadows in a world gone static.  
__We're running away, line by the fading line...”  
_-’[Sudden Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbaJDnKdnHk)’, by Rise Against

-&-

_“I got all muddled up and journeyed to the end of town,_  
_Then the road cracked open, sucked me in, and I went down,_  
_Now standing face to face with the king of the underground;_  
_Some things just don't add up, I'm upside down, I'm inside out._”  
-[’Edge Of Town’,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5s5gNoeCis) by Middle Kid

-&-

_“So can you understand_  
_why I want a daughter while I'm still young?_  
_I wanna hold her hand, and show her some beauty _  
_before all this damage is done._”  
-[ ‘The Suburbs’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHHLISaLe44), by Arcade Fire

* * *

**1\. Wake**

  
In her dream they were still in the car, and air was so bright all around them it hurt. Her mother's silhouette was leaning forward in her seat, her shoulders straight, hands tight on the wheel. Hope was beside her in the front seat, her little face turned away from Grace. Motes swirled through the light.

One moment going on forever, consistent as TV static, quiet as dust.  
  
  
*

They’re about a day past the City border, out on the edge of the desert, when the drugs started to lose their hold.  
  
Their mother hadn't said much at all since they'd sped out of the parking garage, and when the girls had woken up, they kept quiet too. Partly out of fear, but mostly out of obedience; if your elders weren't saying anything, it was good to follow their example.  
Mama had passed them water bottles and food packets when Hope had said, a little nervously, that her stomach hurt. She'd only stopped the car twice, both times to get out and pee into the dirt while she hidden behind the car door-- which grossed Grace out, and was _weird,_ but she'd made Grace and Hope do the same. So Grace just listened. There must have been a reason why they didn't just find a bathroom. And it was better than peeing in their pants, obviously. (But not Better, nothing about this situation was Better, and Grace didn't _understand._)  
They drove long enough that the sun had spun around them in the sky. Looking out the windows still scared Grace, but not because of the dark. It was how _blank _everything was. Before that last night, Grace had spent her life in the Primary Education complex, her family’s apartment building, or the shuttle that connected the two of them. Her class had gone on work-trips but only ever within the southern half of Battery City, which was laid out block by block and contained within the EcoDome. Regulated, evenly-spaced, _safe_. Out wherever they were now, there was nothing like that. No steady, constant frame of resident buildings and Corporate Boards and office towers along the edge of the sky, just concrete, and curving roads on stilts, and more concrete, and dust. It made her stomach feel sick, like she was shrinking down into nothing.  
Eventually night came; both she and Hope had fallen asleep for the second time.

Grace opened her eyes again to find the front of the car empty, and the door she’d climbed in through last night left open. Sand, like there was on the Beaches™ at home, drifted in and sank into the cracks between seats.  
She could see her mother’s outline a few paces outside. She was standing tall with her head craned, as if she was looking at something.  
Grace freed herself from the seatbelt and shook Hope awake. Carefully, both of them shuffled over the bench seat and got out of the car.

Her head _hurt. _She’d thought that the apartment lights first thing in the morning were bright, but that was nothing compared to what her eyes were going through now. The very landscape seemed to be moving, sliding out from under her feet. She stumbled; the movement made her want to gag.  
"Are you okay?" Hope's worried question broke through the air.  
Grace couldn't answer her. “Mama,” she said instead, trying hard to keep the whine out of her voice (even though she felt _sick_, it wasn’t good to whine), “Mama, why does everything hurt so much?”

Hope mumbled something beside her but Grace couldn’t think. Their mother wasn’t even turning around to talk to them. She reached forward and tugged on the woman’s sleeve. “Ma? Why is everything---”

“Lord, can you let me _think_?!” Mama said sharply, in a weird voice, louder than Grace had ever heard her speak. She turned on her heel and slapped Grace’s hand off of her sleeve.

It wasn't a hard slap, she'd barely hit her fingers and Grace's hand didn't even hurt, but it still couldn't compute. Grace's mother had never raised a hand to her before. Grace just stared, her mind too full to process, and only moved when Hope shied away and pulled on her elbow.  
They stumbled backward, wide-eyed, before catching themselves on the car. The two girls clung to each other.  
Somehow, Mama didn't look like herself anymore. Maybe it was the too-bright light and the too-open space all around them. The woman in front of them stood taller than had to be true, staring down at them, her eyes too wide for her face and her face too red for her pretty, pressed business clothes. Her arms were stiff and jerked just a little as she ran her hands back through her hair. “I just need to _think_,” she said.

Grace's bones ached and her head hurt, and it was too hot, and the confusion made everything worse. Pressure began to build up in Grace’s forehead. She scrunched her eyes shut, scared of this new feeling in an onslaught of newness that was all too sharp, and then when she couldn’t help it anymore and no one had said or did anything, the nine-year-old burst into tears.

She felt her sister pull away from her in shock. Even that was numbed, though, by the drench of shame and frustration that managed to flood over everything except the pain in her head, for a minute. Grace hadn’t cried in _years_, not since she’d gotten into Primary Education; big kids weren’t supposed to cry. It wasn’t good to cry when you were old enough to solve your problems rationally, she _knew _that. Even Hope hadn’t cried since she’d started school. All of this ran through Grace’s mind like a hologram stuck on repeat, but she couldn’t stop.

Their mother moved suddenly and Grace flinched. Embarrassed, still crying, she instinctively hid her face in the crook of her arm.   
Strangely, that seemed to help. Her face cooled a little bit and the pressure on her eyes made everything feel a bit steadier. Grace gulped, then sniffled a couple times, her breath rattling around in her chest. When she peeled her eyes open and looked down through her arm, she could see Mama's knees and the toes of her pointed leather work shoes. She could smell her mother's perfume, too. It was familiar, and calming enough that her shoulders relaxed. She looked up.

Mama was kneeling in front of her. The weird bigness of her eyes hadn’t completely left, but it was mostly gone now, replaced by concern. She smiled at Grace and her smile only shook slightly as she raised her hand, and wiped her daughter’s tears away. “It’s okay,” she soothed. “It’s alright, honey. Stop crying now.”

Grace sniffled and hiccupped a few times, but she couldn’t help leaning into her mama’s arms. She felt Hope edge closer to them, and Mama pulled her into their hug too.

A few seconds later, she gently let them go, wiped some final tears off Grace’s face, and dusted her hands off on her business suit. “Alright,” she said, standing up. “Get your backpacks, girls, we’re going to start walking.”

“Why?” Hope piped up again, using her mother’s hand to swing back and forth, her heels making little semi-circles in the loose sand. “We have a car.”

Any other day Grace would have whispered ‘_Be polite_’ at her rude little sister—you didn’t talk that way to adults---, but Hope had actually asked a good question. It was hot out, and the car had air conditioning, and it could drive much faster than they could walk, anyway. Grace looked up at Mama, waiting for her answer.

Her mama wasn’t listening to them; she was watching the horizon, body suddenly stiff.  
The two girls turned toward the place their mama was looking at. Grace's attention was immediately stolen by what she realized must be Battery City; it looked different than it was on all the postcards but somehow exactly the same. Above it, protectively, the EcoDome sparkled in the sun. The _natural _sun. It was their home, and farther away from them than Grace had ever guessed it could be.  
Grace’s stomach hurt, a sudden sharp pain, and she held her middle worriedly. Was she getting sick?

“Because we just have to, baby,” Mama said. “I’ll explain later.”  
It took a moment for Grace to realize she was answering Hope's question. When she turned back to her, she saw that Mama’s eyes looked sort of weird again, and her smile was trembling. Dark stains were soaking through the armpits of her tasteful business suit. She'd never seen an adult sweat before.

Hope glanced at Grace, nervous, but she nodded. Of course they both nodded. They trusted their mother; if she said she’d explain later, then she would.

Grace felt Hope take her hand. She squeezed her sister's fingers before she took her mama’s outstretched hand, too.

In a line of three, they started walking together. When Grace glanced behind them again, looking for real this time, she couldn’t see anything that her mama could have been worried about. There was nothing there, except the dome, and the sky, and far-away friendly white dots of police cars coming steadily closer.

*

  
Grace only realized what was happening later, when she'd learned about the up-down cycle of City meds and how too much became not enough real quick, and learned to be thankful neither she or Hope or Mama had gotten as sick from it as they could've. At the time, the strange cyclone of feelings was just something else new to adjust to. Every hour on the hour, it seemed, she'd felt like she just kept waking up--- and up, and up, and up.

There were some parts of being out in the deser that maybe weren't so bad. She'd thought you could only learn stuff in a classroom, or read it from e-books, or of course hear it from Fact News(TM). She'd thought if she didn't take her Attentiveness, she wouldn't be able to learn at all.  
Now they had no pills and nothing to read, but Mama still taught her and Hope things every day. It seemed like she knew everything. She had names for everything around them, all of the colours and plants and things crawling on the ground. The chirping sound Grace had gotten used to since they started along the highway was crickets_. _The prickly plants that stood close to the ground or taller than Hope were _cacti, _but cactus if there was only one of them, which was a kind of tree. They didn't look anything like trees in the City Leisure Gardens™, but Grace believed her. It was kind of amazing to see.

  
That didn't make up for the awful things, though. The prickly, simmering fear that had first poked at her in the parking garage stayed with her, almost every moment she was awake, and Grace didn't really understand_ why_. Except that she knew Mama was afraid, so she should be afraid too. She hated it. She hated the sun sometimes, when it made it hard for them to sleep, and the winds could get _scary. _Apart from everything else, she didn't like that her clothing was getting so dusty, or how clumped her hair was starting to look.

At home, Grace had taken her prescriptions exactly on time, always (until that last night). She had believed what her teachers and the lady doctor they saw once a month had told her: that the pills were necessary for her growth and development. Without Calmness, she wouldn't be able to talk to people properly, and without Serenity, she would have trouble sleeping. And now, the first time not taking them in her whole life, it felt that way. The longer she went without it, the more being awake _hurt. _Every time she opened her eyes the world seems brighter and louder, with more jagged edges. Even air was like that; weird-hot in the daytime and too cold at night.  
More than once, Grace wished she had all her prescriptions again, especially the ones that used to assure them her that she was safe and happy and her parents would come home. And every time Grace thought _that_, she thought of their dad and how she had no idea where he was or why they'd left without him, and then she had to close her eyes from it as if she could block out thoughts by not looking at them. She didn't have a word for "panic" yet.

She didn’t understand what was happening, and was scared that her brain was shrinking inside her head like sponges shrank and cracked if you didn’t use them for too long. But she couldn’t tell anyone that, because the only people around were her mama and her sister. Hope had gotten a tiny bit louder, maybe, but mostly she’d been exactly the same; and anyway, she was _little_, she wouldn’t understand either.

Which left their mother, but ever since that first day of walking, she'd noticed that Mama had been a little... strange. She’d still done her normal things, making them wipe off their faces after a Meal and brushing both her and Hope's hair tangle-free before they slept, but she'd been less patient than their whole lives, and she rubbed her palms into her eyes a lot, like they were hurting her.

Maybe whatever was happening to Grace was bothering her, too. If it was, then it was probably normal. Grace hated to complain. So she didn't.

  
Every morning, she wished that Mama would give up whatever had made her drag them all out here, so they could all go back to the City and she could get help-- she was obviously still sick. But she got up, again and again, and said they had to move, so they did.

In the middle of the fourth day away from the gleaming metropolis the three of them used to call their home, they took a break for lunch in a dried-out ditch on the side of the dusty highway they’d been walking. Their mama made them sit on their coats, though she sprawled herself on the ground in a carelessness that Grace had never seen from her before. When she unpacked the Meal and water and bowls, her hands shook.

“Let me help, Mama,” Grace offered quickly.

“I'll do it,” her mama said with enough snap in her voice to make Grace shrink back. Mama looked sorry immediately, but her lips thinned, and she didn't say anything. With a slight wince she opened the pack of Meal and separated it into the three bowls, evenly, then poured the water in as well. Warmed by the sun, the Meal grains soaked up the water, rising to half-fill the bowls. They hid the dried-on smudges and crumbs of the previous meals nicely, too, as the other fills had. Mama handed one to Grace, who passed it to Hope and then took the next for herself.  
They all ate in silence.  
Grace didn’t like the silence, which was strange, because meals had always been a quiet time at home. The Meal was bland and almost didn't smell like anything. It had always been that way, too; but now Grace hated it.  
Something struck her like a flash of light; she remembered, a long time ago, drinking something that was cold and sweet like no water ever was. Grace blinked, her eyes losing focus as she stared at the bowl in her hands. When had that happened? She wanted _that, _she thought.

Looking over at her mother, Grace wondered if _she _wanted something that wasn’t there too. Mama had finished less than half of her Meal, and was staring down at it with her face twisted up like she was in pain.

Hope’s spoon clattered to her bowl and she placed it down happily, wiping at her mouth with the back of her arm. “Can I have some more?” She asked, a big grin on her face like everything was amazing, even though she’d been hunched-shouldered and frowny only a little bit before they’d sat down to eat.  
Their mother continued to stare at her bowl, one hand pressed to her temple, and didn’t answer. Hope’s big smile started to falter. “Mama?” She said.

Grace picked up hers and nudged her sister’s arm with it. “Here, you can finish mine,” she said quickly, trying to ignore the way her mother seemed to be only just barely not-crying. She smiled widely at Hope, because it was good to smile at family members.  
Grace didn’t know whether or not it was good for family members to stop eating and cry for no reason, but she thought that it probably wasn’t. She didn't want Hope to notice. “Eat up,” she encouraged, when Hope didn’t take the bowl immediately.

Hope paused for a few more seconds, looking between Mama and the offered food, before she finally reached out and took the bowl.

Grace relaxed a little bit. She really wasn’t that hungry, she decided. And if her stomach bothered her later, she’d just ignore it. Mind over matter, like the Teachers always said in class if someone got in trouble, right before they’d lead them into the Calming Room.

Hope’s noisy eating kind of bugged her, but it was better than the silence. She smiled at her sister and Hope grinned back, teeth covered with enhanced-grain-substitute.

  
  
*

  
The desert didn’t get any less strange, but, slowly, Grace felt... more normal. Her headaches passed, and the world’s brightness steadied into something she could live with. The sand still seemed jagged and too bright, and going to the bathroom beside the road was still weird and gross, but she started to appreciate how _warm_ it was under her thin shoes, and how bright the natural sky was, unlike the staticky brightness of the EcoDome. How fast everything seemed to change. There was so much that Grace had never seen before.

At the end of her first ever week outside the City, Grace looked out to the horizon, and it felt like she was seeing it for the first time. The sky just went on for forever. There were no walls or boundaries anywhere. It didn't seem scary anymore. A few thin clouds, way up above the birds, that floated along like they didn't worry about anything. It was beautiful out here, Grace thought distantly.

Her and Hope woke up earlier than Mama, usually, so as she'd stared, Hope had nudged at her shoulder, craning her small head to see where Grace was seeing. Usually they'd get up and play tag or something until breakfast, but that day they stayed huddled deep in the ditch beside the baking asphalt road. staring up at the sky together.

  
Hope seemed to be enjoying all the dust, the little weirdo. One morning, after they'd looked at the sky and Grace had realized how big everything was, she’d dug under a few inches of the sand and somehow found _wet_ sand, which she'd painted all over her face. Mama had been asleep, so Grace had taken the job of telling her little sister off about it.  
Mama had been sleeping a lot longer, lately.

  
That was the biggest problem, even after Grace had adjusted to most everything else: their mother still wasn’t acting right. The whole time Grace was starting to feel better, Mama had gotten stranger and stranger.

She'd still get up and walk with them every day, always in the same direction, but it was like she thought she was still asleep. Other times she wouldn't get up for hours after the sun had risen, clutching her head with her muscles all tense, and ignoring anything the girls tried to ask her. She'd been yelling more, like she had that first day, and sometimes it didn’t even seem like she’s yelling at _them_, but at someone who wasn’t there. She held her head between her hands more, like it hurt, and and spent rests from walking hunched over with her hands pressed to her eyes. Nothing the girls said or did seemed to help.

At its worst, whatever Mama was going through felt like it'd taken her from them; like they were walking with a hologram who wasn't her at all. Mama just didn’t do the things that she’d done before.

So Grace had to.  
Mostly that meant taking care of Hope. It wasn't too hard, not really. In a way she felt almost better having a job to do. Grace played with her sister, looked over her while she napped, and helped her brush her hair. It was pretty easy to keep the five year-old distracted. Hope seemed to forget things so quickly. She made sure Hope ate all of her Meal, and told her that she could have the rest of Grace’s if she was still hungry. When the sun went down, she huddled with her sister under the blanket like everything was fine. Their mother used her own coat as a blanket on Hope's other side, staring at the stars more often than not, her eyes wide.  
Grace stayed awake longer her. She startled at every noise. Her thoughts ran in circles that got tighter and tighter as the days went on until they’d tangled themselves into knots.

The night she woke up to see that the space on Hope’s other side was empty, Grace wasn’t even really surprised. She was everything else. Swirling feelings took a moment to fight themselves out inside her.

The fear settled first, into her chest and then past it, deep into her bones. Around them the dark suddenly seemed infinitely bigger. Off in the distance somewhere, what sounded like an animal was screaming, high-pitched wails that got louder and then faded again, in a cycle.  
Grace shuffled closer to Hope, pulling her sister tighter to her side. She closed her eyes against everything. _I don’t know what to do, _she thought miserably. _What do I do?_

She decided to wait.  
  


*

When Grace woke again, their mother still wasn’t there. The light was blinding. For a moment, she just stared at the electric blue sky, trying to breathe evenly, her mind filling up with panic to fit her racing heart.

Then--

Someone cried out a curse from somewhere up the road. Faint, but close enough to hear.

Grace froze for a moment, hushing Hope as the younger girl stirred. She bit the side of her cheek, whispered fiercely at her to sister to stay still, and then crawled up the ditch on her stomach until she could peek over the lip of the highway.

A woman was moving quickly towards them. She was too far away to see her face clearly, but she had a dusty, reddened Battery City working casual suit, and long curly hair.   
Grace felt her heart speed up in her chest, like scrubbing a vidlesson forwards. “Mama?” She asked, before she could stop herself. At the same time, Hope poked her head up beside Grace’s, their eyes and the tops of their hair the only thing visible above the road.

The woman froze at the sight of them, then started sprinting. Grace’s stomach swooped with dizzying joy and relief.

Their mother ran over the road and down into the ditch in one motion, wrapping both girls into her arms.  
They hugged and cried and she cried with them, bitterly. It scared Grace; but she just held on tighter. For a while Grace couldn’t hear anything over the sheer noise of her blood pounding in her ears, and her mother’s and sister's heartbeats so close to hers, but eventually she realized that she was apologizing to them.

“I'm sorry,” she mumbled, over and over, pulling back just a few inches to wipe the curls off of Grace's forehead and press a kiss to Hope's hair. “I love you so much, I'm so sorry. I promise I won't leave you, never again. Never again.”

* * *

**2\. Lessons**

Mama was different after that morning. When the girls asked about it, all she said was that she had remembered how to feel everything. (It sounded like a non-answer to Grace, but, it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked adults about twice.)

The day Grace finally learned what her mother meant by that, it was so hot out that the back of her shirt was sticking grossly to her skin. They’d gone far enough on the road now that the scrub plants which had grown up on the sides of the road was starting to change, blooming into pale flowers, and the land had rolled under their feet, growing into hills of sand and dirt and patches of green under the sun. The highway was at the crest of its own hill, now, with ditches slanting downwards sharply on either side. It was mostly quiet except for the birds, the crickets, whenever the three of them talked, and the wind. That morning, Grace heard something else, strange and way out in the background but getting louder.

It was just weird enough in the pattern of their days to make her stop for a moment, suddenly feeling like everything got brighter, into sharper focus. “Do you hear that?” She’d asked, not quite meaning to sat it out loud.  
Mama was walking in front of them right then, but she twisted around to face the girls, getting concerned when she saw Grace’s expression. “What do you--” She stopped talking.  
Grace blinked. Her and Hope circled around in front of their mother, so they were standing side-by-side. The City dome glittered in the distance, looking about the size of Grace's fist; and the annoying buzzing noise had gotten louder. Hope nodded at her glance. “Something rumbly,” Hope said, right before something white rounded the turn of the nearest hill.  
Mama grabbed their shoulders and shoved them off the highway.

Startled, Grace hit the dirt with both hands, crying out in surprise and fear-- then she was rolling down into the steep ditch off the highway, nothing around for her to grab onto or catch herself with. The world tilted under her and the sky spun; her mouth filled with a taste of acid. Then she was skidding to a stop on her belly in a cloud of dust. She couldn't see anything through it, and her eyes stung, but she heard rolling noises from somewhere above her and that droning sound was getting louder and louder.

She rolled to the side just in time to feel Hope land next to her.  
Her little sister sobbed. Grace grabbed onto her arm and pulled her close, blinking the dust from eyes furiously; when they finally cleared a bit she could see sticky red on her temple. An awful cold feeling ran down her back and her stomach, seeing it. Her heart sped up. She'd had no idea what to do, but Hope was _bleeding__, _she had to do _something--_  
Another skittery-rock crash sounded behind her; she'd looked over to see their mother slide to a stop a few feet from them. Grace cried out to her without actually saying anything.

As soon as she could, Mama scrambled to her feet and tripped over to them.  
“_Help her,_” Grace demanded, lifting up her sister as much as she could so Hope was sitting up, still crying into her hands-- but Mama didn’t try to calm Hope, didn’t do anything except push both of them down and then lie across them, covering Hope's mouth with her hand to muffle her crying.  
Her mama was _heavy, _and the sharp ridge of the messenger bag she had slung across her torso dug into Graces chest, making her gasp.

The droning seemed to fill the whole valley.

It was kind of like cars sounded like, back at home, Grace realized; except louder and weirdly grumblier. Where was it _coming _from? Pinned down by her mother’s weight, she'd squirmed around suntil she could see up the hill if she tilted her head at a weird angle. She saw white, and black, silhouetted against the sheer blue of the sky.  
For some reason the clean motorcycle and pressed uniform of the police officer who dismounted from it burned her eyes, the same way all the sand and sky’s colour had burned her eyes when they'd first left home. Two more cycles joined the first one, and as those police dismounted and pulled the keys from their bikes, the droning sound had suddenly cut out.  
_The engines, _Grace realized. She tried to sit up further, but one of the police officers had turned towards the ditch and Mama had shoved her flat on her back again, pulling her close.

  
The mask that looked down from the top of the hill was familiar, and identical to the one that came up beside it. Police wore masks to protect themselves from invisible UV rays that were not harmful to regular citizens, but would hurt their Better, hyper-sensitive eyes; there were little microphones in the masks, too, so a police officer could contact their team if there was an important thing to do that couldn’t wait. There were other, good, safe reasons police officers wore the masks too; all the kids learned about them. Grace still knew them.  
But it was like her body didn’t believe it, right then. Now the white and black and red face on the road above them made the weird cold run sharply up and down her back again, and made the cramp in her stomach worse.

She pressed closer to her mother instinctively.  
Mama tucked her arm closer around Grace and gently pressed Grace’s head closer to her own with her hand that wasn’t holding Hope the same way. Then she closed her eyes, leaning her head down until it touched the soil, murmuring very softly under her breath.  
Grace didn’t know why she did that. But it didn’t matter because, all in a flash, she _got _what her mama was trying to do: it was what she’d learned in Primary Education about animals, like butterflies, and how they kept safe. The three of them been in the desert for a long time now. She didn’t know exactly how long, but enough that they were kind of a mess, especially since they’d rolled through the dirt on their way down. The white fabric of their clothes was crunchy and stiff with their sweat and all the caked-on dust; the curls that her and Mama shared were tangled and dust-filled too. In the tall grass, on the side of the hill, if they didn't move and didn't let their eyes show-- someone not looking closely might think they were part of the ground. She held her breath.

They stayed for so long. The gravel crunched under the police’s feet, and their burbling voices sounded like weird, dark echoes of real language. But finally,_ finally_ they got back on their motorbikes (the drone starting up again; Grace could feel it in her teeth) and drove off.  
  


The instant the police officers were gone Mama let Hope and Grace up, dusting off both of their shirts with the palm of her hands. “I'm so sorry,” she said, taking their faces in her hands and looking into their face like she expected to find something. Mama's wide brown eyes were shiny and over-bright like she was going to cry. “We can’t let them see us, okay?” She said, before Grace could ask her anything at all. “We _can't_. Remember that.” And then she let them go, and turned away toward the desert, her hands in her hair and her shoulders shaking.

Grace had already learned not to bother her, when she stood like that.

Hope was sitting in the dust still, her knees up to her chest, and she was sniffling.  
“Hey,” Grace said softly. She'd put her arm around her and squeezed lightly. After a moment she stared at the cut on her sister's forehead. It'd dried out while they were hiding in plain sight; the sticky-looking blood had gotten caked over with orangey dust, the same that caked their clothing and faces and hair.  
She wasn’t sure what to do about it; Hope had never gotten a cut on her face before. It was hard to get hurt at home. Grace had really only seen blood on TV, when her class was learning about the body’s immune system, and later about menstruation. Neither of which helped. But it didn't _look too bad_, she thought, and tentatively prodded the cut with her thumb.

A split second later she realized that was a stupid idea, but it was too late. “_Ouch!_” Hope jerked away with a yelp and a betrayed look. “That _hurts!”_  
“I didn't mean to!” Grace blurted, scrambling to her feet as if that would help. “It was just an accident!” Even as she said it, shame gurgled in her stomach; accidents didn't _happen _to Good Kids, everyone knew that.  
“You did _so _mean to! You _did!_” Hope cried, pushing herself up too and pointing a stubby finger.  
“Enough,” their mama said sharply, and both of the girls looked at her instinctively. “That's enough out of both of you. Stop yelling.”  
“Grace poked me and it _hurts_,” Hope cried.  
“I was trying to see if it was bad!” Grace said defensively. “She's-- there’s blood all over--”

“Enough,” Mama said again, more tired-sounding this time. She let out a sigh that had an edge to it, but when she turned to Hope her eyes were soft and calculating. While she was still sniffling, Mama gently placed her hand onto the cut on her temple and left it there for a second, like she was trying to heal it with just her mind. “Calm down, baby,” she said. “You'll be fine.”  
Weirdly, it seemed to help. “How are you making it stop hurting?” Hope asked, her hiccups slowing.  
Mama just smiled.

She pulled back for a second and took off messenger bag from around her shoulders. She opened it, pulling out a water bottle and one of her rolled-up skirts. The fabric made a ragged sound as she ripped off most of the hem; she folded the ripped piece until it was the size of her palm and then poured some water onto it. After she carefully twisted the lid back onto the bottle, she pressed the wet cloth to the gunk on Hope's forehead.  
When Hope flinched, Grace automatically moved closer.  
“Shhh,” Mama soothed her, still gently wiping at the cut. The cloth was getting redder and redder every time she pulled it back; some of the colour soaked into her shirt as she rested her arm on her chest for a second. It scared Grace to see it; she didn’t feel like there should be that much_ blood._ “I know it hurts. Breathe through it, okay?”  
Hope started to nod, winced, and then answered, “Okay, Mama.” She started taking big, even breaths, her cheeks puffing out like she was whistling.  
The thudding of her heart from when Hope had yelped finally settled down, so Grace sat back on the ground and pressed her back against the hill, bringing her knees up to her chest. The air was mostly silence again now, except for her own breathing, the far-away cry of some bird, and more crickets. Her head hurt but not nearly as much as before, and definitely not as much as Hope's probably did. “Sorry,” she mouthed to her sister over their mother’s shoulder, and then rested her head on her knees.

“There. Alright. Listen,” Mama said eventually.  
Grace looked up. Their mother was still kneeling, but she’d finished cleaning Hope’s face, and was looking over her shoulder at Grace. “Yes, I mean you too. I'm going to tell you something, okay? Come over here, please.”  
“Okay,” Grace heard Hope chirp, at the same moment she nodded. She got up and went to sit in front of her mother.

Mama smiled at them both. She’d just finished wiping her hands on the cloth from her skirt, which she considered for a moment, reached over to a scrub bush and hung it over the branches like the worst ribbon on earth. Then she asked, “How do you feel?”  
Grace and Hope looked at each other. “My head hurts,” Hope said in a small voice.  
“I know, sweetheart. But how else do you feel right now? On the inside.” She put her hand on her chest, right under where her pretty dove necklace sat. She’d been wearing it since she’d brought them out here. (Maybe she had when they were home, too? Grace couldn't remember.)

“... bad,” Grace admitted, even though it _felt__ bad_ to say how she felt bad. It was too hot out, and her shirt was still sticking to her skin, but now clammy and weird in a way she wasn’t used to. “Like my heart’s going too fast. And cold, a little bit. Here,” she patted the back of her neck. “And my arms, too.” She'd held out one arm as evidence; all the tiny hairs on it were standing straight up in tiny bumps.  
“Okay. Thank you, sweetheart. Hope?”  
“The same thing,” the five-year-old said in a small voice.  
Their mother smiled encouragingly, clasping her hands in her lap. “Thank you. Please listen, this is important. That feeling, sick but not really? And cold?” She watched as both of them nodded. “Well, that's an important feeling. It means you're afraid.”  
Grace frowned. “But it feels different,” she protested. She remembered being afraid, in the City; it was something that you could take medication to help, but that last night, she hadn’t. It had not been fun. But it still hadn’t felt like _this, _this was much worse.  
Hope frowned too. “And I don't like it,” she whined.  
Grace nodded, a little miserably. She looked at her dusty shoes.  
“No one does,” Mama said reassuringly, to Hope, and then to Grace, “I know it feels different now. In the City, that was your medication help... stopping you from actually being fully scared. But now you don’t have it in your system anymore, so you feel everything your body is trying to tell you.”  
Flash cards about the nerves and blood vessels that ran up to your brain surfaced in Grace’s mind. That made... sense.  
Their mother continued. “But that’s okay. It's a totally normal, good thing, to be scared sometimes. Fear tells us when there's something wrong, even when we don't know what it is. Like today... if you two hadn't heard those motorobikes today, and hadn’t told me, I wouldn't have looked behind us, and...” She paused, then shook her head. “That's important, too: you have to tell people when you're scared of something, okay? It's a good thing most of the time, even though it feels bad, because if you tell someone you trust something’s wrong then they can help keep you safe.”

“What do you mean whoever we're with?” Hope asked, before Grace had the chance to open her mouth. Hope’s round face was troubled. “We're with _you._”

Grace stared at her sister, then at the ground, wanting to feel that way too but-- she couldn't. They’d come home to find the TV on and the kitchen table empty, and Hope had cried like the whole world broke. She had stayed awake that whole night, back then, without their mother and totally alone. Even though Mama had come back and explained, even though it wasn't her fault, she'd still _left _them. How could Hope forget so quickly? Grace wished she could, too, just to have it be that easy.  
Their mother had gone still when Hope had started talking, but gave a tiny smile. “Your forehead's all clean,” she said instead of answering.

She pulled away from them both and stood up, re-slinging the bag onto her shoulder with one hand and picking up the ripped skirt-hem cloth. Even in the couple minutes (Grace guessed) they’d been talking, it had dried a lot. She wrung out what was left of it into the dust, which soaked up the bloodied water like it was never there, and then zipped it inside the front pocket of the bag. “We shouldn’t be wasteful,” she answered Grace’s confused look.  
Grace and her sister got to their feet too. Hope’s hand hovered over her forehead. “It still hurts,” she said uncertainly.  
Mama sighed. “Here.” She leaned down, covering the cut with Hope's palm again, and kissed the back of her daughter's fingers. “All better now.”

*

The next day when they stopped for lunch, Mama broke a piece off of a dried-out plant nearby and drew a bunch of faces in the dirt. None of them were smiling. Not in the way that the BLI logo always had been, at least. She let the girls trace over them while she explained what they meant. “This is what most people look like when they’re angry,” she said, pointing the first one. “And this is disappointed_, _or sad.” She drew an extra small dot on one of the faces, for a tear.

Grace and Hope weren’t stupid; they knew what emotions _were _and what they were called. The only problem was-- as Grace learned, tracing her own shapes in the dust-- she’d somehow lost the line that connected what a feeling was called and what it meant, to what it looked like on people, or how to understand what it _felt _like to herself. Back at home she’d really only been happy, most of the time. That was part of what being a Good Kid was about. Most of the people around her had been happy too; not the joyful kind of happy that Mama drew as someone smiling widely, with their eyes closed and laughing. A steadier... quiet kind. A Calm kind.  
It’d been so long since she’d needed to recognize anything else. Grace wasn’t sure what she felt about that.  
“That’s okay,” Mama replied when she told her. “A lot of the time feelings are really confusing.” Like she was trying to make an example right then, she smiled, but her eyes were wet and shiny.  
Grace was starting to be afraid of that shininess. Not knowing what else to do, she hugged her. Hope quickly joined in, too.

  
Over the days, Grace reminded herself over and over to notice and remember the different faces that Hope and their mother made. It was fun, in a way. Hope looked ridiculous when she pouted because Mama didn’t let her chase some birds, or go towards a shiny thing in the distance. And Mama’s expressions always looked more... smoothed, and practiced. Probably that was because she was an adult.

They both did the same nose-crinkling, eyebrow-lifting thing when they were trying not to laugh. Grace remembered now. Papa had done that, too.

*

  
Mama came up with games for them that she called silly things like “I spy”, or “Going on a picnic”. She sang them songs-- Grace had no idea she'd known so many songs. Some of them were familiar, and others seemed like they weren’t even from Clean Radio (The Only Radio(tm); some were in Spanish, which Grace recognized but couldn’t understand. They all sounded beautiful.

If Mama ran out of songs and neither girl felt like games, she’d tell them stories to pass the time.

A lot of the stories didn't make sense, like the one about a boy and a girl climbing up a hill to get water and then falling down together. Some only made sense when Mama explained them a bit, like the short poem about kids born on each day once they knew what 'sabbath' meant.

Hope loved all of them. She'd asked their mother to tell them her favourites over and over again, especially the one about the little boy who lived on an island and never grew up. When they were taking a break she'd use her fingers to draw in the sand or loose dirt, tracing little thin girl-shapes with wings. “I made Tinkerbell,” she'd say, pulling Grace's sleeve. “Come look.”  
Grace secretly thought that one was silly. Pixies sounded useless as friends, for one thing, even if Tink _had_ saved Peter from the poison. She got tired of it after the fourth time, but didn't say anything because Hope looked so wide-eyed and happy.

She encouraged them to try and tell each other stories, too. That felt a bit weird to Grace, even though she couldn’t quite explain it. Learning was one thing, even learning songs was still_ learning._ Telling stories just seemed like it was wasting time. Shouldn’t she be encouraging them to be productive? To Better serve?

The discomfort faded as the days went on, though, because it was just... fun. A fun something to do on the road. The endless, endless road. Grace's shoes had actually started to wear through; she hadn't thought that could _happen_. The longer they walked the more it scared Grace, in some small darkened place at the back of her thoughts, where the light barely ever hit so it couldn’t be washed away. Every day they went farther and farther away from the City, from home, and every day there was still so much _more _to go.

Not knowing where they were going didn't help. If she really thought hard about it... she didn't think they were going much of anywhere.

Grace didn't want to ask, but Mama hadn't said she could explain, either. The only time she’d ever gotten close was when they’d made it into a blooming part of the desert, where there were flowers all over and the scrub grass was actually green, which Grace wouldn’t have believed could be true if she hadn’t seen it. Their mother hadn’t let them wander too far off the path, but they’d still stayed in the same place longer than they would have otherwise, to stare at the flowers for a while. Grace had never seen anything brighter than them, except for the sky.

It was nice, except when she looked up as to see that Mama had walked off to a farther bush that looked like it had something clinging to the branches. “Mom?” Flew from her mouth without her meaning too, the spike of panic vanishing as quickly as it’d showed up.

She turned and smiled, waving at Grace and start back to them fast. Her hands were full of fruit. Beside them again, their mother sat down on the ridge that jutted out just above the cluster of flowers Grace and Hope had been looked at together. She was rolling one of the fruits between her fingers.  
It was small and violently blue. A berry, Grace was pretty sure; those came from bushes, and other fruits from trees. But she didn’t really know about it other than that. She did understand by now, though, that this was her mother’s thinking face; Mama fidgeted with things in her hands when she was remembering.  
She and Hope looked at each other, then back at their mother. “You said we couldn’t eat those because they’d make us sick,” Hope said after a moment, like a question.  
“That’s right,” Mama said, glancing back up at them with a smile, then looking back down at the berry. She looked different than she had when they’d left home; her long curls tied up in a ponytail, which she’d never wore to work before, and her jacket off in the heat of the day. She squeezed her fingers and the berry popped open, oozing a surprisingly red juice onto her palm.

When she took Grace’s hand and started drawing on the back of it with the berry juice, Grace blinked but didn’t move away.

Even though the letters smudged a bit before she finished, Grace could still read them. N, E, S, W, like points on a diamond. She drew them on Hope’s hand, too, and when she was done Hope held her small palm up to Grace’s so they could compare. ‘E’ right under their knuckles, ‘S’ under their pinkies, ‘W’ just above the fluttery pulse on their wrists, 'N' on the left curve of their palm.  
“Is it supposed to say ‘news’? You’ve got the letters wrong,” Grace asked.  
“No, honey.” Mama took one of the other berries, popped it, and gave herself letters too. Then she held up her hands. “They mean directions,” she explained. She turned and held her palm flat out.  
Grace and Hope glanced at each other, and then mimicked her. All three of them squinted into the distance, staring at the still-rising sun.  
Mama pointed with her clean hand. “The sun rises in the east. That’s what the ‘E’ is.” She held her palm open like she was offering something to the sky, and pointed her fingers to the sun. The sisters did the same. “That never changes.”  
“Like the streets,” Hope looked up for approval.  
Mama’s face went funny for a second, but then she nodded. “Like the streets,” she agreed. “But… different.”  
“Prettier,” Grace said quietly.  
She smiled, a special kind of smile that moved the corners of her eyes with it. “Much prettier,” she agreed, then kept going, describing the other directions based on the sun.  
“Is that how you learned it?” Hope asked, straining her neck to look at the sky.  
Mama bit her lip a little. Grace noticed, but she didn’t think Hope did; her sister’s eyes were too wide to actually make sense of what was in front of her.  
“No,” their mother said finally, “But it’s what will work right now.”

Grace huffed a little impatiently before she could stop herself. This seemed _pointless. _Mama shot her a Look, and she shrank back into her jacket a bit. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

Their mother hummed for a moment, then moved on. “Here, listen.” She shifted where she was, leaning down to hold both of their wrists and rub them with her thumbs.

Her eyes were serious, and the way her hair smelled meant _safe._ Grace did listen when she said, “The city’s windows all pointed East. When we’re on this highway, the city is always west of us, away from the sun. If anything happens-- anything-- go east. Walk towards where the sun rises. Run, if you can. They won’t catch you if you’re far enough away.”

Neither girl said anything to that. Grace thought that Hope might be as stunned as she was. Run-- from who? _Why_?  
Mama had said that before, when they had seen the police officers. Grace had almost forgotten; they'd gotten so far away from him since then. All at once it hit her again, how much her mother wasn’t telling her; how much she didn’t _know. _It... made her a little bit angry. She could understand not telling Hope, her sister was just a little kid, but Grace wasn’t. Good Kids didn’t get angry at their parents, though.  
She took a breath and held it instead.  
Their mother pulled them to her, kissing their foreheads and the tips of their noses. (Hope let out a giggle that lit up her dirty, thinning face.) She hugged them and repeated herself: “If anything happens, you walk against the sun.”

_But why are we running, _ Grace thought, and didn’t want to think of the answer.

*

“... she took the magic necklace, and when she put it on she fell into a deep, deep sleep,” Mama was telling them for a bedtime story. Her fingers moved soothingly through her daughters' hair.  
Grace was using her mother's thigh as a pillow and only half-listening. She had her eyes closed. It was night time, after all; and they'd walked up a lot of hills that day. The ehills seemed to be getting steeper and wilder lately. She didn’t know what it meant. Right now that didn’t bother her, though.  
“The evil queen laughed, because her magic had worked, and ran back through the forest to the castle.”  
“There can be _bad _magic?” Hope asked.  
Just from the sound of her voice, Grace could tell her little sister was wrinkling her nose like she'd smelled something new and gross. She smiled a little. It was cool, being able to tell people's feelings by their voices.  
“Yes, baby,” Mama answered patiently. “It depends on who uses it, and for what. When the seven robbers got home and found Blanca Flor on the floor, they tried everything they could think of to help her, but she didn't wake up. Then the good robbers got very sad. They all loved her so much that they worked together to build her a beautiful crystal coffin, that she could to lie in and be safe, and they put it in a cave off in the woods so they could go visit her.  
“Time went by. One rainy day a prince and his servants were walking through the forest, and they found Blanca Flor’s resting place. When the prince saw her face underneath the crystal, he thought that she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen; and that she must be an angel. His servants picked up the coffin, and brought it back to his kingdom. He built a beautiful church to put her to rest in---”

“Wait,” Hope interrupted. “Why doesn't he try and wake her up or anything?”  
“Because the prince thought she was dead,” Mama answered.  
“But why does that... what does dead mean?”

Grace felt her mother's sharp intake of breath, and opened her eyes. First taking in the pitted, drooping ceiling of the old house they’d luckily found for the night. (Her mother had said it probably used to belong to a farm, and most of it must have gotten destroyed in the Fires that Grace had learned about in school. Barely standing, but much better than nothing.) She looked at her mama's widened eyes and downturned mouth. “Mama?” She asked, drowsy but suddenly a bit worried, too.

Like with emotions, Grace and Hope weren’t stupid. They knew that people and animals and plants didn’t live forever, and that everything came from somewhere. Some of Grace’s lessons had been about BLIndustries’ revolutionary machines that let them recycle everything from light, to water, to air, to the remains of people after they passed on and had been given a respectful funeral service. That was higher-level lessons than Hope would’ve had, though. Some things could be hard for little kids to understand.  
The problem was the same: a connecting line, missing. She’d never heard anyone talking out loud about death, before. Hope apparently hadn’t heard it at all. So they waited.

Their mother bit her lip. “Well, dead means... dying is...” she hesitated. “It's leaving. The people who are dead aren't a part of the world with us any more. Their body will still be there, but their minds, and the part that makes them _them, _it goes away.”  
“What do you mean?” Grace sat up and turned to face her mother. “How does it leave?”  
Hope nodded along, eyes wide with curiosity.  
Mama looked at her hands. “There’s a lot of ways,” she said, finally. “But most of the time it’s because-- for whatever reason-- their body can’t take care of their mind anymore.”  
“... I don’t understand,” Hope said.  
“Most people don’t.” Mama smiled, even though her eyes were shiny again. “It’s a really big question, sweetheart.”  
“I know, but, where do they go?” Hope asked. She was sitting cross-legged and looking at her mom intently. “When people’s minds leave. What happens to them?”  
“Well, a lot of people go to heaven-- heaven,” she added, seeing her daughters’ confused faces, “Is somewhere beautiful, where souls go when their bodies die. God takes care of them there, and they're very happy, for always.”  
“Can they come back?” Hope asked.  
Mama shook her head. She looked upset now, but when she noticed Grace looking at her she just smiled shakily. “No, sweetheart,” she answered. “Once people are dead, they’re… they can’t come back at all. They’re gone.”  
Hope looked upset and pressed closer to her mother. She hugged the little one close with one arm, and gestured with her other hand to Grace.  
Grace leaned in, too, instinctively, but she was frowning.

It was quiet for a while. Then Hope asked, “What’s the ending?”  
“Oh. Well, the prince has a church built and Blanca Flor is laid into the floor, like a beautiful jewel. And one day someone tries to steal the enchanted necklace, and she wakes up. Then the prince and Blanca Flor get married, and they have a very long and happy life together. The lesson is that you shouldn't take things from strangers, no matter how pretty the things are.”  
Hope sniffed. “I like Peter Pan better,” she said decisively. “And Clemencia.”  
“Those are good stories, too,” Mama agreed, but her voice still wasn’t quite right. “And it’s time for bed now, alright? Both of you.”  
The girls grumbled at that, Grace mostly by habit, but they lay back down anyway and closed their eyes. After a minute, their mama started stroking their hair again.

A long time later she stopped, and as gently as she probably could she moved out from underneath Grace’s head, setting her carefully down on her rolled-up jacket which worked as a pillow. Grace kept her eyes closed and tried to stay as limp as a doll, so Mama would still think she was asleep. Something wasn’t right.

The room was quiet for a while. Then it started: muffled sounds of crying.

Grace wiggled around under the blanket, looking for her mother. There-- in the far corner of the room, just outside the patch of light from a hole in the upper wall, curled up like a sad comma on a page and covering her face with her hands.  
It felt awful, just seeing her look so sad. Grace got up as quietly as she could-- Hope was fast asleep right at her side-- and picked her way carefully over the cracked and dirty floor.

She remembered the night they left was just like this, except now she’s cold all over, and instead of saying anything Grace just sat down next to her and curled into her side.  
Her sobs paused and she looked down at Grace with confusion. Smiling weakly, even while tears continued to leak down her face, she asked, “Did you have a bad dream?”

“Did Papa die? Is that why we left?” Grace asked, speaking quietly so Hope wouldn’t wake up.

She heard her mother inhale sharply, and then start shaking again. Drops of wet fell onto Grace’s hair. “Mama,” she said quietly. When she didn’t answer right away, she butted her head into her mother’s chest and hugged her, suddenly fierce, tears running down her own face as she squeezed. “_Mama._”  
“He’s-- I’m so sorry, baby,” her mother said, and pulled her properly into her lap, cradling her tight>  
“Bu—but,” Grace heaved a breath, stuttered. She pushed away just enough to mop her own face with her dust-stained sleeve. “But how… _how_.” She looked up through her bangs and took a few deep breaths, like Mama had taught them to help calm (but not Calm) down, until her voice stopped shaking on the word. “How did he… Please. I want to know.”  
Grace stopped talking, because Mama was smiling. A sad-smile. She hated that she knew what that looked like now.  
Her mother tapped the tip of Grace’s nose. “That’s determination,” she said, very quietly.  
Grace frowned. Mama shook her head and pet Grace’s bangs back from her face. She breathed in, and out, and in, and out, and Grace actually started to slip back into sleep before she heard her mother answer her.  
“It was during lunch,” she whispered, and Grace stiffened in her arms. She was still petting Grace’s hair back from her face, like she’d forgotten she was doing it. “They called both of us down and we went. They asked me questions, I didn’t realize what it was for, but I just answered them. They asked him, questions, too-- we held hands on the table-- and then they took him to another room.”  
Grace didn’t sniffle, didn’t shift, didn’t say anything at all.

Only feet away from them, Hope rolled over in her sleep, murmuring something indistinct. In the moonlight, the little girl’s face looked pale and too thin. _ Five. _ She was practically a baby still. Grace remembered her starting to cry when Mama and Papa didn't show up at the right time, when they should have. Hope had looked so relieved when Grace said she'd make them supper, and happy when she'd said they could share a room. She’d felt so much even with the medication; and she only felt more, now.  
_ I can't tell her this, _ Grace realized, then promised herself even as fear made her hands numb: _ She can't know about this. _

“And after a while, I went to look. I wouldn’t have, but the smell--” Her expression twisted in a way that Grace didn’t know. “But, that’s when I knew that the Industry had... had killed him.” Mama took a deep breath, wiped her hair out of her damp face. “I am _so _sorry, Grace.”  
“... the smell?” Grace asked, her voice tiny. She hadn’t meant to sound so small.  
Her mother hesitated again. “When the police fire their guns, it smells like lightning,” she explained slowly. “That was... what I noticed. It’s an awful thing.”  
Grace was about to ask, _what’s lightning? _But then her mother spoke again. “I made us leave right then, because if I’d stayed in the City after I left the-- the building, they would’ve taken you and Hope away to live somewhere else.”  
“No,” Grace blurted. Horrible, cold fear sank itself into her back. “That’s not-- they _wouldn’t_\-- we need to stay with _you_.”  
“I know,” Mama said quietly, hugging her just that bit tighter again. “I know.”  
She waited for her mother to explain--_ why,_ but the moments stretched on, and nothing came.

  
Mama wasn’t telling the whole truth. Grace knew it in her gut; and she felt like if she thought enough about it she could figure out the rest of the story on her own. But she didn’t want to. Instead of saying anything, she just nodded. She only realized she’d started crying when her own curls stuck to the tops of her cheek.  
“Oh, baby.” Mama whispered.  
Grace could feel her press her face to her hair again, slowly, like her head was a pillow and her mother was so, so tired. She was tired too_. _

She hid from the truth in her mother’s soft coat while her mom began to rock both of them back and forth.

-


	3. The Desert III - IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated warnings! 'Major Character Death' and 'Graphic Depictions of Violence'. 
> 
> Additional warnings: police violence, in the sense of Draculoids are called (& thought of as) police by Grace; and state/City sanctioned murder of civilians, canon-typically.
> 
> All the ones from last chapter also apply here, especially for the death of a loved one, and kids feeling pressured to parent their siblings.
> 
> -

_"Some had scars and some had scratches,_  
_it made me wonder about their past_  
_And as I looked around I began to notice_  
_that we were nothing like the rest."  
_-'[Mountain Sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt7ox1M_XG4)', by Of Monsters and Men

-&-

_"Move your body when the sunlight dies,_  
_everybody hide your body from the scarecrow._  
_Everybody hide!"  
_-'[S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx3X7Tg4axo)', by My Chemical Romance

* * *

**1\. Others**

The Zone line between One and Two was an actual line pressed into the ground, stark white on the ashphalt, and a fence on top of it that ran all the way through the brush. From where Grace was standing it looked it stretched to the edge of the sky. Black-and-red-masked police officers patrolled it, their uniforms the same colour as the border. Grace’s family had to veer off the highway to avoid them. Mama helped the girls climb over the fence once they were out of sight, tossing their blanket on top of the sharp metal coils on the top so they wouldn't get hurt.

Between Zone Two and Zone Three, though, there was only a parade of large signs that were low to the road, proclaiming 'Zone Three: Radiation Levels Critical. Turn Back.'. Someone had burnt holes in the middle-most sign in a pattern that looked like a smiley face. Hope had laughed, though Mama'd only shaken her head. Grace didn’t know how she felt about it: the smiley face was funny, but the idea of burning holes through metal felt... worrying, in a way she didn’t quite understand.  
  
  
In Primary Ed, a million years before, the teachers had talked about the reasons for the Zone designations. There'd been a Pre-Fires map and carefully calibrated quizzes. It had to do with the different kinds of ground, and if there were a lot of hills or none at all. Grace had memorized the placement of the numbered borders, but she'd never imagined them as more than identical grey bands on a school page. Of course, the _real _desert wasn't grey, or identical. The landscape just outside the City had been all deep ditches filled with some strange sort of reed-plant and, far off in the distance, old wrecks of cars. Only a day into Zone Two, it was suddenly plain country; only a few inches of dip on the edges of the road before the reddish, perfectly flat sand of the desert stretched on and on in every direction.

  
Then in Zone Three it had suddenly changed again, giving way to hilly country that wasn’t like anything Grace had ever seen. She thought of the dragons in her mama's stories. The hills looked like they could be the back of one, an _old _dragon, big and smart enough to not breathe when people watched then.

A lot of things must be good at hiding, out here.

The only thing that didn’t change while Grace’s family walked was the highway. The one they’d first followed out from the City was still steady under their feet, a smooth ribbon straight out to the horizon that just kept going. It seemed weird, that it was kept so smooth, when even the signs that marked it started to get worse: rusted unreadably, or burnt, or peppered with holes, or entirely ripped off from the poles they were supposed to hang from.  
Once it turned into a bridge over the deep dried-out bed of a real river. Grace and Hope hadn’t ever seen a river: they’d craned their necks over the shoulder-high barriers with wide eyes. Mama explained that the water had dried up a long time ago, but they could still see the eddies in the mud that’d made up the bottom of the channel. It’d hardened and cracked around the edges. Rocks, animal skeletons, and bits of trash pocked it, standing out moles on an old person's face. It was _interesting.  
_Then something had moved in the shadow beneath it.  
Mama pulled her and Hope back by their shoulders, hurrying them to the other side.

She’d spent the rest of the day telling them stories about billy goats and trolls, and kept her hand close to the front pocket of the messenger bag, half-turning a lot to look behind them.

  
*

  
Sometimes they'd see signs of other people. A building far away, bigger than the blown-up shacks they sometimes slept in, that had lights and low music dancing from inside of it; trash on the side of the roads that wasn’t completely dried out or buried in sand drifts; or sometimes just a group of people, six or ten or thirty, seemingly popping out of the ground a ways off into the desert.

The people always ignored them, and Mama usually ignored them back, keeping her hand pressed to her bag. The girls followed her example.

Rarely, someone would come up closer to them than two miles. When that happened Mama would tell Grace to watch after Hope, and wait wherever they were. She’d walk off to meet those people alone. She moved differently when she was moving away from them; tall and completely sure of herself, with her shoulders straight.

Usually she gave the stranger something from the messenger bag after talking for a minute. When she came back to the girls after going to talk with someone she was carrying extra stuff in her arms; more water, or food, or special cream that made the sun less harsh on their skin.

Grace always wanted to say 'thank you' to the strangers. It seemed polite, which was obviously Good, since people they didn’t know had given them these nice things. Even when it was obviously a trade. In school there had always been lessons about citizenship and Good Samaritans and respecting your neighbours. Her teachers had called it ‘social cohesion’. It felt important to carry that with her, even out here: it felt _fair.  
_But whenever she brought up talking to the people, thanks her mother always shook her head fiercely. “Only freaks and-- and bad people get thrown into the desert. Grace, you can't go near or talk to them, _ever_, do you hear me? I can go because I’m an adult and I have to,” she added, and Grace closed her mouth. “Trust me. The people out here are dangerous. They can do anything.”  
“Okay,” Grace answered, stung but trying to hide it.  
Hope spoke up quietly. “But Mama-- we aren't bad. Or freaks.”  
“That's different,” Mama said sharply, and that was it.

As they got farther out, more buildings grew up out of the earth, closer and closer to the road. More strangers, too.

A couple days in Zone Three found them in what Mama said had been a farm a long time ago. The whole area was about as big as the Education District had been back in Battery City. They’d walked into it in stages. First, lines and lines of large trees with branches like finger bones stretching up to the sky; they made a sort of fence against the desert. Inside the tree fence was a field of dried husks that would’ve been plants once. Past the field, an old house that looked half-broken down sprawled out. A little past that were another building with a sharp triangle roof that Mama said had been a place for animals to stay, and a tall metal cylinder that was wider around than the house. “It’s a silo,” Mama said, “It was used to keep the animal’s food safe and dry.”

“What’re those people doing there?” Hope asked, pointing (even though she didn’t have to; it was super obvious who she meant).

Vehicles of every kind were parked close to the silo, though none of them were parked very well. Beyond them, brightly-coloured people were coming in and out from it like it was an office building; they were lounging around the vehicles, passing bottles or smaller objects around to each other and laughing loud enough that the burble of conversation was audible even a few dozen feet away at the broken-down house, where Grace’s family had paused once they saw all the people.  
“I don’t know. You can look at it from_ here,_” she added, sharp again, to Hope, who’d started hurrying towards it excitedly. “No closer, do you understand?”  
Hope pouted but fell back in the small semicircle her, Grace, and their mother made in the house’s thi shadow. “Yes, Mama.”  
“Good.” Their mother was getting her trading face on; straightening her shoulders and clearing her curly hair out of her face completely, so that the full effect of her glaring eyes came through.  
She still smiled at Grace as she handed her the messenger bag, though. It was light, half-empty; Mama had taken some things from it and wrapped them in her second skirt, tying the corners together to make a sort of pouch. “Wait for me, and don't move,” she said, as usual. “I'll be gone for a while.” Then she kissed both Grace and Hope on the forehead and walked, tall, through the maze of cars.

  
Being left alone after that first night was still scary every time. Grace stared after her mother for as long as she could, pushing the panic down in her chest.  
“Do you think we can climb this?” Hope asked all of a sudden. When Grace looked back at her sister, she had her hands braced against the trunk of the bare tree.  
Grace craned her neck to see the top, readjusting the messenger bag's strap on her shoulder. She blinked a couple times. Weirdly, it was easier to concentrate when she had something to do. “Um... Mama wouldn't want us too.”  
“We wouldn't be moving!” Hope wheedled. “And she really only said not to move.”  
Hesitating, Grace looked back into the crowd, then at her sister. “Okay. but only a little bit up. And I'm going to come too.”  
Hope grinned and pulled herself onto the first branch.

For a few hours the two of them sat in the tree together, pointing out interesting cloud shapes or especially eyecatching jackets in the crowd below them. Sometimes people wandered over to their tree and called up to them; but Grace knew to ignore them, and would nudge Hope about it when the little girl would giggle at being noticed.  
To Grace, from all the way up there, the crowd looked almost alien. She'd never seen so many people in bright clothes, or so little. And their _hair! _People had it growing near past the top of their legs, or dyed three different colours, or puffed out cloud-like around their head the way hers could get if she missed the appointed haircut appointment in Gen Ed. Still others didn't have any hair at all. One of them, Grace could see had a spiderweb drawn into his skin with something black, and the little spider dangling off the lower right corner of the web.  
It made her eyes hurt, she was trying so hard to see.

In the sky, dozens of swooping white and grey birds with small beaks float on the small breeze. Mama had called them seagulls, which didn't make that much sense to Grace; they'd learned in Ed that the sea was miles away. Still, they were funny to watch, bobbing in the air and ocasionally diving into the crowd of people, coming back up with some small piece of food in their beak. Once, a large bird circled above the flock for a while; both Grace and Hope watched it with wide eyes until it soared away.

When the sun had dipped low enough in the sky that all the shadows on the farm were stretched tall and thin, their mother came back with her arms full. Grace and Hope scampered down the tree and went to hug her. She hugged them back as best as she could. “Help me get this stuff over to the base of the tree, baby?” She said, as Grace was handing her back her bag.

The pack she'd came back with was mostly cans of chewy protein replacement that she said the Industry stocked in desert vending machines for its patrolling police officers. Also, some dusty but sealed bottles of water, and a few sheafs of paper bound together by plastic spiral rings, like Grace's workbooks at school.

These last ones their mama put in her lap when they all sat down, with their backs against the old tree. Using a few sharp pencils that she scrounged from the bottom of her bag, their mama sketched out twelve boxes, large on the paper. Then she'd divided them until there were littler boxes in each, all made of neat, straight lines. A calendar. She let Grace label the months and the days, and lightly struck out about half of them.  
Grace peered over her shoulder while making sure to keep Hope-- who was three trees down, tracing things in the bark with her finger--- in the corner of her eye, but when she saw all the crossed-out months she stared. “We haven't been gone that long. We can't have been. Right?”  
Mama shook her head, smiling just a little bit. “We left home late in May.” She covered the first five months with her palm. “See? We've been out here three weeks. I took enough Meal and water for about two weeks, but with the extra supplies I've traded and the rain---”

“Wait, what happened to your hand?” Grace blurted. Hope's head swivelled and she headed back over to them.  
“What?” Mama turned her hand over, looking for some kind of mark. “Nothing. What do you mean?”  
Grace pointed to her mother's bare fingers. “Your rings are gone.” For as long as Grace could remember, her mother had had three beautiful rings, one on each finger from her thumb.  
Her mama looked sad, but she nodded. “I know, baby. How did you think I was getting the food?”  
Oh. “I—” Grace hadn’t been thinking about it. She closed her mouth, feeling guilty and stupid.  
“You traded your sparkles?” Hope said, confused and upset. “_Why?_”  
“Because food and water is more important than holding onto baubles,” Mama said. Her voice was getting close to the stormy tone of _anger, _or _annoyance. _It meant 'stop asking'.  
Still-- something about it didn’t_ feel_ right. “But-- but your wedding ring,” Grace said. “Yours and Dad’s weren’t just a bubble,” hearing herself mispronounce the last word and wincing. “It was special.”  
Mama's face twisted a little, but she just pursed her lips. “It’s just jewellery. Food is more important,” she repeated, and went back to making notes.

She was right. Obviously, of course, she was right, and not _just _because she was their mother. It didn’t make any sense to be upset about it.

  
Still, seeing her bare brown hand with its absence of smooth white-gold, made something rise in Grace’s throat; she wasn’t sure if it was anger or fear, but it was cold and prickly, and she didn’t like it. Almost by themselves her hands clenched into fists.  
Needing something to do, she turned and grabbed their messenger from the ground beside them. Checking supplies, she thought. Sure. Mama had went through it already, arranging all the stuff to balance so it’d be easier to carry, and zipping the pockets closed. But Grace wanted to check anyway.

There wasn't much of their own things, from home, left in it. A blanket, their bowls and spoons, the water, the lighter. Two pristine white shirts folded down into the bottom corner. The single hairbrush with some bristles broken off from the wear-and-tear of being inside a cramped bag all day; only taken out when Mama painstakingly brushed Grace and Hope's hair loose in the cooling-off air before the three of them lay down to sleep. All of her mother's jewellery was gone; so was her make up and her perfume. The loops of shiny thread, the pretty glass bottles that she'd kept lined up and spotless on a special shelf in the bathroom at home, replaced with sand and metal cans that were just this side of too-warm-to-touch. When Grace was smaller she’d spent so many mornings sitting on the edge of the tub and watching her mother carefully apply tubes and wands and sheer-looking pastes, years of practice showing through. At the end she'd be defined, definite; looking Better, being Better. Beautiful. All of that was gone.

Thinking of it gave her a feeling like a storm growing in her forehead. Her eyes stung. She scrubbed at them with the back of her fist; as she did, she felt her mother take bag away from her.  
“What’s wrong, my love?” Mama asked, sounding surprised.  
“Are you crying?” Her sister's high-pitched voice said at the same time.  
“No!” Grace said defensively, dropping her hand.  
Hope was looking at her_. _“It''s not Good to lie. And it was only jewellery,” the five-year-old intoned lile she could possibly understand.  
The feeling grew sharper and more painful; Grace swiped forwards, trying to get her sister to shut up, but Hope just hopped away. She was on her feet where Grace was still sitting down, and she couldn’t stand up fast enough to catch her. On top of that, Hope was_ giggling,_ which was just mean. “It's not funny, you--!”  
“_Enough_.” Mama’s voice was stern and it shut them both down on reflex. As they stilled, she continued: “Hope, don't tease your sister, and sit down, Lord knows we'll be walking enough later. Grace, why are you upset?”  
“I'm not-- I’m not _upset_,” Grace mumbled. “It's just the sand, it's in my eyes.” She stared at the loose dirt by her shoes.  
Her mother sighed. Then she shuffled closer to her, and Grace turned, surprised, as Mama cupped her face in her hands. “Gracie,” Mama said gently. “What’s wrong?”

Grace tried to breathe through it, then to hold her breath instead, but her eyes burnt and it all just burst out. “Your rings are all gone and you don't have any of your extra clothes left and your pretty stuff is all gone too but you still saved our stuff and I don't understand and it's _my fault _and I just _hate it_!” Embarrassed, angry she started to cry, pulling away sharply to hide her face in her arms.

“Oh, baby.” Her mama didn’t wait another second before hugging Grace tightly to her. “It’s_ not_ your fault, I promise. Shhh.” She kept hushing her, letting go with one arm to pull Hope into the hug too. “It’s_ neither_ of your faults, please don’t think it is. That’s not true.”  
“I’m sorry,” Grace said, hiccuping a bit; Mama hugging her like this made her think too much of the night when she’d told her how dad had-- what’d happened to Dad, but taking comfort from her mom was too ingrained for Grace to even _want _to push away. She just shut her eyes against the fading evening and the bone trees on the other side of the field, focusing on Mama’s hug.  
“It’s alright, Gracie.” Mama hesitated a moment. “I trade my things because I don't need jewellery anymore. Or too many extra clothes. I can do just fine with the ones I have on. Your and your sister are more important.”  
“But you _loved_ them,” Grace protested, looking up at her.  
“I love _you_,” Mama said, voice deep and grave.

She’d said it a hundred thousand times; but something about this, in the fading light with bone trees behind them and strangers around, felt different. Heavier.

It shook Grace a little. She pulled back.

Mama let her go, still holding onto Hope who was snuggling into her other side. She watched Grace carefully, not even a hint of laughter in her eyes. Maybe she felt the heaviness too.  
After a moment, she relented. “Let me show you two something.”

Hope scurried beside Grace, and the two of them sat in front of her expectantly.  
Mama swept her hair back from her shoulders. When she brought her hands forward again, she’d undone her dove necklace. The charm shimmered on the chord, reflecting the sun in little spots of light that danced on the ground and the Joshua tree behind them. “This was a gift from my mama,” she told them. “She gave it to me when I was very small.”  
For some reason, Grace had never thought of her parents as having parents, too. “Oh.”  
She nodded. “It’s my favourite, and it’s very important to me. The dove is God’s sign, it means good luck and protection, and love.”  
Grace hadn’t known that either. Her and Hope both nodded. The silver dove was all smooth curves, its wings outstretched in a mini arc and a slim branch held its feet. It looked happy.  
Their mother smiled a little at them. Then she leaned forward, brushed Grace's hair out of the way, and put the beautiful necklace on her as Grace watched with wide eyes. “Here,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “You'll keep it safe for me. And it’ll keep _you s_afe.”

Grace took a deep breath in without meaning too. “Me? Are-- are you sure?”  
“Yes, baby. I’m sure.”  
She held the charm in her palm, feeling where it was still warm from Mama’s neck but not too hot like other metal would be after a desert day. It hung farther down her chest than it had on her mother’s, but it was made for an adult, and it’d be under her shirt anyway. She could imagine it hovering right above her heart. Protective. Loved. Her eyes stung again but this time the feeling behind them was warm and comforting. “Thank you Mama.”  
Her mother leaned back and smiled at her again, a bit watery. “You’re welcome, Grace. I’m glad you like it.”

Then she turned towards Hope, who’d made a small noise of annoyance. “If you want something, you need to use your words.”  
Hope was sitting with her arms crossed and trying hard to look like she wasn’t pouting. At their mother’s notice, she scowled, looking at the necklace and then quickly away. “It’s not _fair,_” she complained. “How come Grace gets a present?”  
Mama pointed at her nose. “None of that. Envy’s a sin.”  
Hope’s small shoulders deflated. “’m sorry,” she mumbled.  
Mama nodded, and then after a moment, turned to the bag again. She rummages for a second before pulling out a pencil and the notebook she’d drawn the calendar in. These she held out to Hope. "Here, baby. These are for you."  
“For your drawings!” Grace said quickly, smiling at her sister when Hope’s gaze flicked towards her, like she was trying to decide how she should act.  
Hope’s eyes got round, and she started wiggling excitredly in her spot. “Can I have them, Mama?!”  
“Yes,” their mother answered, smiling a bit. A moment later her arms were full of excited five-year-old; she laughed and held her close.  
Grace smiled to see it, still holding onto the charm.

  
*

  
If Grace's mother had any idea what was coming, neither Grace or her sister had any way to know.  
  


The three of them spent the night sleeping against the thin Joshua tree. Hope had wanted to sleep up in the branches, but she’d had put her foot down about that one. She'd given them the blanket, against Grace's insistence that they could all share, and watched carefully as her girls fell asleep.  
Afterwards, Gloria turned her eyes the darkness around them, waiting for any sign of threat. She kept a tight grip on the gun she'd stashed in the front pocket of her messenger bag. She stayed awake the whole night.

A week and a half later their world split apart.

* * *

**2\. Power Out**

Zonerunners talked about Before like a matter of myth. Before the Fires, Before the Industry, before the Zones themselves and the Phoenix Witch and the desert itself-- at least the desert they knew. The Before was a separate age; ‘after’ was just _ now _, the immediate present. Blasters and droids and Power Pup protein rations. Aftermath was secondary. Now was real.

Grace hadn’t known any of that at the time, but she’d understood it when she met Zonerunners. She’d done the same thing, in a way. Mama had been killed, and it split her understanding of the world into two pieces. Before and After.

When she dreamed about it, Grace would see and hear everything in City-clear crispness. At first, most of the time she was awake it played behind her eyes too, repeating and repeating again. Eventually that stopped, like a hologram recording wound down. But she still remembered everything. Little pieces fitting themselves together like the puzzles she'd finish in early Primary Ed, when you were still little enough that the supervisors let you run around the classroom and play.

They'd been walking slowly for a few days. Hope had strained her ankle landing out of a tree wrong, and they’d needed to be careful. The air was sticky. Great hills of clouds crept in around the edges of the sky, and the weird before-rain crackle was hanging in the air above them like it belonged there, signalling _ danger. _Mama kept her right hand clutched over the side of the messenger bag, tight to her body like she was scared someone would suddenly run up and take it away from them.

The old building had loomed out of the desert, looking almost the same as the East Greenhouses back home: low to the ground and brick-shaped, light shining off of the windows that made up the two long walls. Only almost though. While the Greenhouses had been an elegant pearl colour, the desert building was all pale oranges and browns; instead of the smooth glow of the greenhouse's energy-absorbing glass, the walls reflected brighter than the fluorescents back home ever did. And of course, the Greenhouses had doors; the building looked like it’d had them once, but the bricks around it had fallen in, a long drift of sand covering everything but the very top of the empty doorframe.  
Sand hadn’t completely covered the large square of concrete out in front of it, or the rusty pumps that stuck out of the ground like cacti. A rectangular yellow sign stood crookedly on its roof; most of it had been worn away, except for 'BEST' in round black letters.  
“It’s an autogarage. People used to have their cars fixed here,” Mama explained when they were close. “They’d park them out front here, or inside.”  
“It's a fairy sign!” Hope declared. “It means we should stay here for the night.”  
Grace looked at her MouseKat watch-- it was battered and dusty as the rest of her clothing, but still ticking faithfully. Then over at her sister. “But it's not even noon? Shouldn’t we keep going--”  
“No, Gracie. Your sister's right,” Mama said. Her long neck craned back, looking at the sky, at the clouds. “We need to get inside soon. This will be a bad storm when it hits.”  
“Oh.”  
“And because of the fairy sign,” Hope piped insistently. “Like we'll have the _best _time here.”  
She sounded a bit smug, Grace thought annoyedly. _Ugh._

Mama set off ahead of them to try and find a way inside.

  
Grace and Hope milled around in the parking lot. Hoped hummed happily, drawing stick figures with wings in the dirt.  
Grace stuck her hands in her pockets and kicked a nearby rock with her foot. It skittered to the side, bumped a clump of weeds, and then came rolling back, knocking on her ankle. Curious, she kicked it again. It followed the same path, coming back to tap gently against her shoe, like a new kid at school tapping on her shoulder. It was smooth all around, about the size of her hand, and covered with thin rings and speckles of red and purple. She stopped and picked it up. “It’s pretty,” she mumbled to herself, turning it over. She smiled at it, tossing it up and down a few times in her cupped palms. It was a little heavy, but that was reassuring to her. There was a little hole in it near the top end that went straight through to the other side. She looked through it, curiously, but didn't see anything except for her sister's little face as framed by a stone.  
“Can I see that?” Hope asked, little hand already outstretched.  
“No.” Grace held the rock against her chest protectively. “I found it, it's mine.”  
“Come _on,_” Hope whined. “If it's just a rock, it doesn't matter if you let me hold it or not.”  
“It matters to _me, _because it's _mine_,” Grace insisted. “Go find your own if you want one so bad.”  
“There isn't another as pretty as that one out here--”  
“That's because I found it--”  
“Girls!” Their mother called sharply. She was pushing up one of the banks of windows. She frowned at them.

The same moment something huge grumble in the distance, like dozens of car engines at once.  
Grace and Hope both jumped, Hope instinctively clung to her sister and Grace's fist tightened on her rock. They craned their necks to look at the sky. “What _was _that?_” _Hope bleated.  
“Don’t be afraid! It’s just thunder,” Mama called. “It happens when there's a big storm; it's the clouds getting ready to let go of the rain. Now, get inside!” The first drops were starting to fall all around them.  
Grace stuck her rock in her pocket and they hightailed it over to her, ducking through the little space their mother had managed to make in the door-windows.  
Mama rolled in after them, carefully setting the weirdly folded-up, jointed windows on the ground again so they were totally sealed off.

As soon as they’d made it inside the rain started to come down in earnest. It drummed on the glass.  
“It’s so loud,” Hope said in awe. “It _never _gets this loud at home.”  
“That’s because this is a real storm,” Grace said before she could think. When Hope turned towards her, her eyes big, Grace flailed a little and looked to their mom. “Right?”  
“... yes. The City’s Ecodome produced the rain that we’re used to. This is from the sky.”  
A huge flash like a fluorescent bulb bursting hit the entire sky. Grace and Hope both yelped.  
“Don't flinch, it's alright! That goes with thunder,” Mama said, drawing them closer to her. “It's called lightning.”  
Lightning. _The smell. _Grace flinched back from the glass like it burned her. She saw Hope look at her weird, about to ask what’d happened, but shook her head fast. Hope fell quiet.  
Mama didn’t seem to notice any of that. She just kept talking gently, trying to calm them. “It happens during a storm because there's so much energy in the air. When it gets louder it's right over our heads, but when its quieter, it means the storm's going farther away. It's really close to us right now, but that's alright. It'll pass.”  
“Can it hurt us?” Hope couldn't seem to help asking. Even though the noise was loud and dangerous, she took a few steps closer to the wall of windows, head tilted so she might see the sky.  
“No,” their mother said, putting her hand on her back comfortingly. “Not when we’re inside.”  
Grace _knew _that wasn’t right. But Hope couldn’t. So she stayed quiet.

Maybe it was because of how menacing the storm was, but the auto-garage seemed smaller when they were in it. Almost the whole building seemed to be one wide room where Grace guessed the old people must’ve fixed the cars. Strange half-rusted metal braces stuck out of the floor all over the place. The floor itself was bare concrete, right up to the shadowy bare-brick walls.

A small room stuck out from the back wall, tucked into the corner. It turned out to be a small office-- or it would’ve been, once upon a time. A broken wood desk sat in the middle of it.  
They left their bags piled in the corner, on Mama’s insistence. “We’ll need to sleep here tonight, and if it gets cold, we’ll stay warmer in a smaller place,” she explained.  
She took her jacket off to add it to the pile. Then she leaned on the broken desk, massaging the side of her head with her face scrunched up like it was hurting.

Not sure what was going on, but sure that Mama wanted them to leave her alone even without saying anything, Grace quickly herded her sister back into the main room.  
The two of them spent the next few hours climbing over the braces and inspecting all of the walls. Hope looked hard at their lines and then tried to copy them exactly onto her notebook.  
When she got tired of that, she took out her little lesson book from the city and made some scribbles on the City-given Zone Map that was in it. “This is where we are,” she showed Grace importantly, tapping on a little dot jst at the edge of Zone Four. “And these other dots are where we've been.” She'd sketched little trees to show where the silo was, as well as a water drop for a well they'd passed.  
Grace nodded at them. “That's good, baby!” She'd been chucking little round metal pieces against the big, bolted down metal poles that were set into the floor. It made cool sounds when she did, like the rain almost. She was trying to see how far away she could stand and still get it.  
Hope rolled her eyes and shut her notebook, carrying it in her arms like a doll. “Only Mama calls me that,” she said. “I'm not a _baby._”  
“She calls me it, too,” Grace pointed out, smiling a little bit. “And you are too, compared to me.”

Her sister just huffed and stalked away to one of the brick pillars that had grafitti strewn all over it in dripping letters. She sat down in front of it and flipped open her book again, looking up at the pillar and back onto the page a few times before she started scribbling.  
Grace snorted and went back to her own game.

  
Eventually, the sky had slid from rain-dark to night-dark outside the tall windows. It’d kept raining. Instinct as much as habit pushed the both of them back to the small room, to sleep.  
Mama had found some large mats and an old, dusty coat somewhere, and laid them out on the floor with their own coats and the blanket folded over it like a bed.  
Hope actually tripped and fell into it before she realized it was there. The littler girl landed giggling, so Grace wasn't worried. She, being smart, knelt carefully and felt forward with her hands, lying herself down between her little sister (who was twisting around, trying to get as much of the blanket as possible) and the warm, still bulk of her mother on the other side for the last time.

Sleep came easy enough.

*

  
The first two times everything had changed, she'd woken all at once, like someone had flipped a switch behind her eyes. That time her sleep rose and fell like waves, until finally something caught her dreaming mind and pulled her up like she was surfacing from water.

It took her a moment to place where she was, what was going on. The rain had stopped. But there was still noise outside; a crunching, rumbling thing, with weird little squealing notes. What was that noise?  
Her mother was whispering a word she didn’t know, furiously, over and over again. As Grace’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw her shoulders were shaking. Mama was standing by the small window of the small office with her palms flat against the glass, staring out.  
Then suddenly she got quiet. She dropped to the ground, split seconds before the grimy windows were lit up, hot-white and burning.

Grace made a small noise on instinct, shrinking deeper into her blankets.

Mama looked over and locked wide eyes with her. Her dark eyes are wide with fear and worry.  
Goosebumps ran up Grace’s arms. The light-- headlights. Cars. Zone people? The thieves and murderers her mom had warned them about-- or. Or policemen from the City. The people who had killed her father were coming here where her and her family were trapped. Any hope she could've had fell apart with one more look at her mother's face.

The noise finally clicked: the wheels in their tracks out in the garage ceiling, rumbling and squealing as the window-door-walls were pushed up, and open.

_Oh no. Oh, no._

  
Hope rustled her blankets, and then rolled over, sitting up. Grace could see her silhouette looking towards her, and past her at Mama. Her voice was small and confused. “What---?”  
“_Shhh_,” Grace hissed.

The too-bright light left the windows and that was when Mama moved, crossing the office in a crouch. First she went to the messenger bag that she'd been using as a pillow, took out something that Grace couldn't quite see and tucked it into the waist of her pants. Then she rounded on the girls, and with urgent arm movements and a few hushed words herded them into the corner of the small office that was farthest from the door.

Hope bumped into her shoulder and she blindly reached out, squeezing her hand as comfortingly as she could.

Mama was kicking apart their makeshift bed, scattering the blanket and their jacket-pillows. She crouched and dragged up the old coats they'd been using as a mattress and pulled them back over to the corner where the girls were standing.  
Grace felt rather than saw her shake, as she came close enough to them for them to feel her body heat. The vague shapes of her mother's face got closer, as she knelt to be eye-to-eye with them. Another blaze of light filled the windows and she could see Mama mouthing something fervent in the language she didn't recognize, that Mama said her prayers in. Her eyes were glittering and _afraid_ as she took first Hope's and then Grace's faces in her hands, and rested her forehead against theirs, gently; Grace could hear her murmuring the same strange words to both of them.  
The light passed again, and it was just the three of them and their breathing in the small room.  
Grace felt her mama kiss both her cheeks and smooth her hair, almost compulsively. Hope's hand tightened on hers.  
“Take care of your sister,” her mama whispered to Grace. “Keep safe. Take care of yourself. Promise me, baby, right now.”  
“I will,” Grace promised instinctively.

Outside, the deep, sure-of-themselves and slightly warped voices of City police officers were echoing off the bare concrete walls. There was a sound like the pop and hiss of the TV set at home when they'd just turn it on. Her mama froze for a second.

Grace's own nerves were ringing high in her ears; she couldn't make out what they were saying. Suddenly nervous, she grabbed onto her mom's arms. “What do we do?” She whispered, trying to keep her voice from being too high.  
Mama take a deep breath. Then her shadow leaned to the side and picked something up off the floor, holding it back out to her. “Hold still,” she whispered, then put the heavy fabric over Grace’s and Hope’s head, pushing on their shoulders until they sat down on the peeling linoleum floor.

Grace pressed her palms in front of her face instinctively. Against her palms, it felt like the coat she'd fell asleep on, soft and sort of oily, thick with dust. She held her breath so she wouldn't sneeze. Beside her, she heard Hope do the same.  
She felt Mama put her hands on their heads, like a blessing, under the sheet. “Stay here,” her voice said, shaky in a way that Grace hated, but strong. “Keep quiet. Keep safe, and--” she paused a bit more shakily, then said, her voice thick, “And remember I love you.”  
Grace pulled Hope closer with one arm, fear thudding through her. “Mama--”  
“Shhh.” A final squeeze, like a hug, then her hands were gone.  
Her mama’s boots thudded across the floor, and then something clicked out loud. The lock on the door, maybe.

Grace couldn’t help it. She fumbled her one arm free, without letting go of her sister, and pulled the coat back just enough to see out.

At the exact second she did, light flooded in again; Grace had to blink a whole handful of times before anything except a bright blur made sense. Finally she could see her mama with her back pressed against the wall, in the small space between the window and the door, holding a sharp-sided piece of wood from the broken desk over her shoulder with both of her hands.  
Something metal shined from her waistband, and Grace instinctively pressed backwards when she realized it was a _gun. _A weird one, the shape of the handle seemed wrong and the colour was too dark, but unmistakable. Grace had seen them before, but only on police; and once during Primary Ed’s Career Day fair when smiling Industry officials had come into their classroom. It was the only time a citizen outside of the police body of Battery City_ could_ see weapons. None of that fit with her mother. Where had Mama gotten a _gun_?  
  


The warped voices were right outside. Her mother was breathing slow and steady, and for some reason her eyes were closed.

Three booming knocks cracked through the thick air of the room. A policeman’s static-drone voice, not overly loud but certain: “Citizen, you are surrounded! You have ten seconds to comply.”  
Grace flinched back against the wall, hitting the back of her head. The coat slid down her face a little more. The dark seemed to press in. Still hidden underneath it, she felt Hope curl closer, shaking. Grace hugged her more tightly and shrunk down the wall like a caterpillar, breathing in the weird oily-dust smell with her gaze still locked on the door.  
Mama’s eyes were open now.

Without warning the door burst open, cracking along its hinges, and light like burning wire flooded the room. A lot of things began happening very quickly.  
As the policeman with his red-white-black-all-over mask took his first stride into the room, Grace’s mother moved, pivoting on her heel so she nearly knocked the officer over head-on, and swinging the sharp piece of wood as she went, catching him in the throat.  
The policeman fell backwards with his hands clutched to his neck, gurgling horribly from under the mask. Gloria followed her swing through, using her momentum from turning to push forwards past the policeman on the ground; she shoved her way through the door and out of Grace’s sight.

From outside there was a screech, and an intercom’s panicked crackling; the light that filled the room suddenly went wild, spinning sideways through the window like a flashing warning signal. Something hissed and the air stunk like ozone; sparks flew from the wall opposite the door.  
Grace flinched backwards even though they were nowhere near her, and yanked the coat over her head again in one movement, pressing her face to Hope’s hair to muffle her scared yelps. She felt her little sister’s skinny arms wrap back around her immediately, and the two of them huddled as screams and shouts filled the garage.

A pop echoed off the walls, loud enough to make Grace’s ears ring; several screeches followed and the smell of lightning was everywhere, blanketing close and choking, even under the protective cloth and dust. Another loud pop; something crunched against the concrete sickeningly, barely hearable under the screams except for how it made Grace’s stomach lurch. Before the crunch could even fade something rang loudly, like an alarm, and then an almighty _crash,_ metal howling, like something had fallen against the metal braces sticking out of the floor. A sharp scream of pain punched the air before it was cut off.

And total silence.

Grace was so scared she barely breathed. Her heart hammered in her eardrums and her eyes ached. Her arms held tight around Hope; who was holding back so tight, her fingernails were pressing into Grace’s arms.

Then the moment broke. Two clashing voices speaking over each other outside, angry and loud. Grace’s mind turned to a stark humming nothing. She felt cold.  
They were ones she recognized: the warped droning of a masked policeman, and Mama’s, though ringing and unmistakably _angry _in a way she’d never heard before. Grace couldn’t breathe.  
“Citizen 28632, Mrs. Gloria Calderon Westem--”  
“I am Gloria Calderon Westem, badge number 730, Trainer At Head of Internal Promotions, and you--  
“-- you have been accused and convicted of kidnapping--”  
“-- _you_ are attacking a superior member of personnell and you will _stand down_\--”  
“—aiding and abetting, public endangerment, absconsion without authorization, destruction of City property- and terminal assault on three registered officers. Your extermination is sanctioned by Supervisor Korse as of May 18th, 2018.”

At the word 'extermination', Grace wrenched the coat off of her head without thinking. Whatever light had been outside the door was knocked aside, burning against the windows; through the now-open office door they sparkled like knives. The officer she'd seen her mother hit was still on the ground, unmoving; he had his hands something sticky and dark leaking from his neck.  
Another policeman was standing off where she couldn't see them directly, only the tall stretched-human shadow stretching out across the floor.  
“Do you comply?” The warped robotic voice asked.  
Mama’s voice was strong and cold and clear as anything. (She couldn't be hurt, couldn't and still be able to speak like that, Grace was sure, she'd be fine.) “I do _not_.”  
A short pause.

“Goodbye,” the policeman said.  
Another screech and the dull thud of a body hitting the ground.

  
*

After. After the gunshot, ringing silence. Maybe mostly in her head. Maybe outside, too, the desert holding its breath.

_No, _Grace thought.  
She pushed free of the coat, then tucked Hope back under it, shaking her head. “Mama _said_,” she reminded her sister in a sharp whisper. The bundle under the coat nodded and then pushed itself deeper into the corner.

  
Her legs felt like jelly. On the way across the small office she almost tripped over the messenger bag. When she walked past the still policeman her shoes stuck a little, but she didn't look down.

The smell of lightning lingered, and now there was another one, sickly-sweet and smoky. Grace stepped into the garage and tried not to think.

The room was cold and quiet, except for the one policeman’s crunching footsteps. He was bent over two white figures who were slumped on the ground, a dozen or so feet from her. Both had dark painted across their heads and half their faces—their faces which were half-off, revealing different faces underneath them. The police officer was talking to them, or maybe recording the circumstances of them falling, deep voice reverberating through the sound-converter in his mask. The light they’d brought into the garage cast his shadow tall and bent on the walls.  
Grace looked away from their empty mask-eyes and even emptier faces. Her gaze fell on her mother’s crumpled body.

She moved, closing the office’s door behind her instinctively. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears again. The policeman was still occupied checking up on the other two, so she walked fast to her mother and then knelt beside her. Everything was too sharp and too bright like it’d been back when she’d first gone off her medications. Too real.  
Shards of glass sat scattered like crystals around where her mama was laying, dusty and old, with new flecks of red. A regulation Better Living Industries gun, sleek and compact and pearl-gray, sat on top of her mother’s loose, opened palm, close to Grace’s knee. There was a smell around her something horrible— and something worse.

She knelt more carefully than she’d ever in her life. Grace’s panic flashed for some reason to Papa; her whole body was trembling again. She put her hand over the charred, perfectly circular hole in the left side of her mother’s chest and held it there, in the air, shaking badly; she couldn’t put her hand down like her mama had to comfort her sister when Hope was hurt that time, because--  
because--  
Mama wouldn’t feel it anymore. Her eyes were closed, she'd closed her own eyes, but she wasn't moving or breathing and she had a hole in her chest which meant that she was-- gone. Dead. _Gone. _

_No! _  
  
Grace nudged her mother’s shoulder with her other hand, then again, shaking her and ignoring the horrible way _Mama’s _head just lolled around. Grace started crying, crying hard, and she grabbed her mother’s shoulders and started shaking her with both hands—  
  


And she heard the policeman’s boots on the ground beside her. She froze.

He tapped politely on her shoulder, the same way that the Monitors always had in the hallways when she’d accidentally stepped in front of one of them on her way to refill her water bottle or use the wash-rooms. Instinctively, she turned her head towards him.  
“Citizen 47223. Child Grace Westem.”  
Grace nodded, again on instinct. The Monitors had asked—or told--- her and her friends that, too, when they were filing into class for their first-ever day. All masked officers in Battery City had a plug-in to the BLI databases implanted in their eyes; everyone out of Primary Care knew that.  
The policeman’s voice didn’t sound any different than it had when he’d been reading out her mama’s supposed crimes (_wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong), _but he put his hand on Grace’s shoulder, like he was trying to comfort her. He was close enough for her to hear the whir of tiny computers in his mask. Little lights flicker in the dark lenses that blacked out his eyes.“You are registered as kidnapped,” he said. “You have suffered a loss. I will escort you back to Battery City so you may receive the appropriate care and attention. You poor girl,” he added more quietly, as if he thought she’d believe it that way. “This must have been very hard for you.”  
“You shot her,” Grace said. She was surprised her voice came out so quiet; in her brain the words were huge, dripping, scarlet like the marks on the other police officers’s faces. Her hands were shaking again so she lowered them to her sides and closed them tightly. Her newly-grown-out nails bit into her palm.

The policeman took his hand off her shoulder. “Have you taken your medication today, Grace?”  
It was a calculating question. Not taking your pills on time every day was not just Bad, it was unheard of. You _had _to take your medications if you were part of Battery City.  
Grace opened her mouth to say _yes of course-- _but then she remembered her tears. Better people never cried like this. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and shook her head 'no' instead, going for a small truth. “Mama didn’t bring any with us,” she explained. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears.  
“You poor girl,” the officer repeated. He knelt on one knee and extended a black-gloved hand to her. “It's time for you to go home.”  
Grace looked behind him at the three other unmoving officers, their masks half-off. She looked beside her at her mother's unmoving body, her stained and charred shirt, remembered her combing the sand from Grace and Hope's hair and wiping it off their faces with infinite patience after she'd came back from wherever she'd ran.

Grace's hand moved to the heavy stone in her jacket pocket; she'd kept it there like a good luck charm, comforting while she slept. Her fingers clenched. It felt real, solid. Too-warm in her pocket. The haze that'd settled over her mind lifted just enough to let her see the way the policeman's eyes went to her arm and the way his legs tensed, like he was preparing to move.

He didn't have time.  
In the same moment as he began to pull back from her, she grabbed the gun from her dead mother’s hand and lunged forwards, a cry tearing itself from her throat as she knocked him sideways off his feet. The policeman landed hard on his back, his gasp as the air was knocked out of his lungs like a roar through the voice-converter.  
Grace moved quickly, without thinking, smaller and faster than him, digging her knee into the top of his chest and pressing her one palm hard on his forehead, grinding his skull into the concrete. With her other hand she pressed the gun to his forehead, fingers shaking with fear and pain and the sharpest anger she'd ever felt.  
The policeman thrashed around, trying to get free, but was winded and gunless and her kneecap was driving into his neck. Couldn't move, only yell warped words that could’ve been anything, but didn’t mean anything at all. And it was just a gun. In Grace’s hand. It was just a gun. Any kid who’d grown up watching MouseKat adventures knew how to use an Industry gun like this, you just held it careful and straight and heard its whine as the laser-blast charged and then you pressed the trigger down and-

*

After...

After she’d cleaned her hands as best she could, wiping them haphazardly on the dead policeman’s jacket, after she’d spent time staring blankly at her mama’s body. She started moving, slowly like she was stuck in a nightmare but knowing for sure what she needed to do.

After, Grace walked into the office’s doorway for the last time, it was to see Hope with the wrapped the old coat around her like a blanket, sitting beside the messenger bag and holding her notebook like it was a living thing that had been hurt. A few stray papers were scattered around, probably from when Mama had kicked apart their bed. Grace hadn't noticed them before.  
When Hope saw her she popped to her feet like a spring. “What happened?” She asked, eyes wide and fingers tight. “What was all that noise?”

Grace hid her hands in her sleeves. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. Instead of talking she started going around the room like a janitorial-bot, mechanically stooping to the ground to pick up blankets, her backpack. She tried again when she’d gathered almost everything: “M-- Mama's gone,” she said.  
“Where?”  
“I mean--- Mama's _gone_,” Grace repeated, eyes stinging. She grabbed the strap of the messenger bag by her sister's feet and hauled it over her shoulder; it was heavy, made her shaky arms shakier. “Come on. We have to go, baby.” The word popped out of her mouth on instinct and she couldn’t take it back. A second later Grace felt bad for it; like she’d stolen them.  
Maybe she should’ve known it wouldn’t work.  
“Don't _call _me that,” Hope snapped, hugging her notebook tight to her chest like a doll. “Were not going anywhere, she can't just-- _don't!_” She bolted suddenly, pushing right past Grace and running into the main garage.  
“Wait!”  
Grace ran after her sister, panicked, and almost crashed into her again outside the door.

She was standing still, her notebook on the floor beside her feet. Staring at the red mess underneath the mask that was lying on the floor, and next to it, their mother's unmoving body. Even as Grace watched her eyes filled up with tears. “What _happened?_” She wailed.  
Grace picked up the notebook and handed it back to her sister. “I told you---” And her throat closed up. She coughed, then swallowed, shaking her head against the tears that had formed themselves in her eyes.

Wordlessly, Hope took the notebook and hugged it to her chest. Taking small precise steps, she waked closer to their mama and put her little hand on the grimy glass window-piece that was bent above the body. She looked at Grace, eyes wide. “But what happened with _this_?” The little girl pleaded.  
Grace swallowed, looking to the left, where panels of glass were missing. Already a sharp desert wind was blowing through the hole, sending streams of sand onto the concrete. Any warmth the room had was lost. She pulled her jacket tighter around her.

When the laser blast had gone off, the policeman had stopped trying to get up, and Grace had put the gun down carefully beside his head, then gotten up and went to sit by her mother's body for a while.

Her mind had been full of white noise. In the City it would've felt like a pleasant prelude to sleep, but nothing was the same and all she'd heard in it were the popping noises that left holes in the other police officers and the screeching that may have been guns or people, and her mother, a hundred years ago, explaining to Hope and her what 'dying' meant, and what heaven was. Grace had looked at her mother's closed eyes and tried to believe that Mama was in a beautiful place now, and she'd always be really happy and have someone look out for her there and she’d see Papa again, but the smell and the dark and the rain was too real and she'd just screwed her eyes shut and held very, very still.  
With her eyes closed, it felt like the world was a cave. Grace had found herself thinking of seven robbers, and a dead princess with pale skin who was only actually dead because of a spell._ The robbers found her on the floor, and they were very sad, so they decided to make her a beautiful coffin made of crystal that would keep her safe...  
_Grace had opened her eyes.  
She didn't have anything to dig with or wrap her mother in (the desert was cold at night, she'd need the blankets), but she _could _make Mama a coffin. Something beautiful to shield her from things, and keep her safe until--until _nothing. _Just keep her safe. The garage didn’t have any crystal, but there was plenty of glass.

Grace had gotten up, gone to the corner that had the rustiest-looking hinges and no sharp edges broken off, and pulled at it until her hands were smeared with grease as well as blood. The two-by-two bay of windows came off eventually, with a smaller screech than she'd expected. With a sound like a metal beast dying she'd dragged the windows over to her mama's body; then carefully, hoping as hard as she could, she'd arranged the glass over her mother, with the windows' sides safe in small ruts on the floor. It made a sort of cone-like point the top, and her mama's feet were barely covered, but they _were _covered. In the light, the folded windows shined, almost blocking the unmoving woman from view.

In the story Blanca Flor had been in a deep, deep sleep when the robbers had found her. Grace didn’t know if her mama looks like she could be sleeping; she kind of assumed adults had a different way of sleeping than kids did, because any time she’d woken up, even out here, her mama had been awake already. But Mama’s eyes were closed under the bent-up glass, at least.  
(She wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t a fairy tale. But that was too_ frightening_ to try to understand right then, too big, and it felt right, doing this. It felt right.)  
Grace had hovered a few more minutes, watching her, and then had took the heavy rock with its beautiful greens and purples and reds out of her pocket, and set it down quietly at the head of her mother’s coffin. A gift, or a gravestone. She wasn’t sure. But it was as much as Grace could do, so it had to be enough.

Now, Grace looked back at her sister, and she tried to smile as best as she could. “Mama's happy now, remember?” She said. “I gave her a coffin. Like Flor's,” she added. “To keep her safe.”  
Hope's eyes got wide. “Until the prince comes here,” she finished excitedly.  
The strain on Grace's shoulder was starting to hurt, but her frown didn't have much to do with that. “What?” She wasn’t making any sense.  
“We'll have to wait,” Hope announced, and just like that darted back to the tiny room where they'd been sleeping a million years ago.  
Grace was left in the middle of the room beside two corpses, angry and tired and her arms still shaking a little. She realized, in a slightly far-off way, that the world outside the windows was less dead-black than it had been. Morning was coming.

A few small scuffling sounds, then Hope flew back out of the office, arms full with things and her backpack on, looking far too bright. She hopped past the dead policeman as if she didn't even see it--  
Grace moved on angry impulse, grabbing her sister's shoulders and yanking her back from the little hemisphere of glass. “What are you _doing_?” Grace said loudly, shaking her sister.  
“No, I just know what we have to do!” Hope squirmed out of her sister's clutches and then sat down, right there on the concrete. “He'll probably come up this way,” she chattered, flipping her notebook open and showing Grace the long, long road they'd walked up all these days. “I don't know how it'll take him and all of his servants, but--”  
“What are you--” Grace started, and then it clicked. Hope thought that the fairy tale was real, their mama had just drank some kind of unfortunate potion and would wake up as soon as she was kissed, like she didn't have a _laser burn _in her chest and like she wasn't breathing, like a policeman hadn't done it to her and to Papa and like Grace hadn't-- hadn't---

She saw red. “You _idiot!” _She exploded, dropping the messenger bag on the floor and smacking the notebook out of her sister's surprised hands.  
Hope's face changed, looked scared, and then angry. “I'm not an idiot!” She protested, grabbing for her notebook, but Grace kicked it away. “Hey, don't--!”  
“_You _don't!” Grace shouted, and Hope flinched; Grace felt sick, but she couldn’t stop, she turned and kicked the messenger bag as far as she could, and then turned again and picked up the pretty rock and chucked it at the nearest pillar. The noise it made was huge and echoing but not enough. “Don’t you_ get it?!_” She screamed again, rounding on her sister who was now huddled beside their mama's glass coffin, eyes wide. “This is real, Mama's _dead _and Papa's _dead _and the only st-st- stupid prince that'd _ever _be coming here is a _policeman_ who'd take us back to the city and split us up and we'd never see each other or go to school ever again, because we're--- we're _horrible,_ and we're Outside and we don't have any parents and Mama said to take care of you but everything's _Bad, _and we have to go now or it'll only get _worse_! And stop _crying!_”

Because Hope was crying, now, absolutely wailing like Grace hadn't ever seen her, or anyone, do before. The little girl had sat on the ground and had her hands over her ears like she was trying to block out Grace's words, and her eyes were closed so tight they'd gone pale. Her cries echoed weirdly in the empty garage, and she looked so small and _alone. _  
  


The anger in Grace's system rushed out all at once; replaced by a sick feeling and a falling feeling, like she’d stepped down wrong and twisted her leg. She didn't like it when Hope was crying.  
She crept over to her sister, sitting down when she was right next to her so she could pull Hope into her lap. “No no no, don’t cry, please don’t cry. It’s be fine, everything—it’ll all be fine, I promise, I _promise. _I promise, we’ll be okay--”  
“No we won't!” Hope hiccuped, hands over her eyes now. “You _just _said we wouldn't! Mama's _gone _and we cant' go back home--”  
“I'm an idiot,” Grace interrupted her sister. She pulled her jacket's sleeve over her hand and used it to wipe off of the littler girl's face. (Hope was just little. What’d she _done_? Why’d she yell at her like that?) “I'm an idiot and I'm sorry. Of course we'll be fine. I'll make sure we're fine.”

As she said the words, Grace felt like they settled into her skin. They were true. _S__he _would make sure they were fine. Mama couldn't anymore. Mama had told her too, before any of this had happened. And Grace had promised_. _She’d _promised.  
_Grace looked over at the messenger bag and drew a shaky breath.  
Carefully, she stood up, letting Hope slide onto the ground. The five-year-old was still sniffling a little bit, but she'd graduated to wiping her own eyes, so Grace felt okay with leaving her for the five steps it took to go over to the messenger bag and pick it up. She unzipped it gingerly, checking inside. None of the bowls or cutlery had shattered when she'd kicked it, and none of the seams were broken. She zipped it back up and slung it across her body this time, feeling the weight settle differently; it was a bit more comfortable this way.

She could do this. She had to-- and she would.

Grace went back to Hope again and sat down beside her, fishing out a water bottle. “Here. Wash your face a little,” she told her sister as she handed it over. “But drink first.”

Hope did. After a few seconds, she passed it back, and Grace took her own swig and then spilled some of the water onto her hand, so she could scrub her cheeks and under her eyes. (She remembered, suddenly, one of the lady-teachers from Ed: once, Grace had been rounding a corner and the teacher had been right there, huddled in the hallway, a fistful of tissues held up to her face. Watery lines of black had stained her cheeks; her Beautifying eyeliner was leaking. The teacher had smiled widely at Grace, and then walked up and off to a classroom as thought nothing was wrong. Now that Grace thought about it, she'd never seen that teacher again, after.)

“What are we going to do?” Hope asked in a small voice. She was looking up at Grace, eyes wide as they'd ever been when she'd looked at Mama. She had taken her backpack off and was clutching it to her chest.  
Grace closed her eyes for a few seconds, and then got up, taking Hope's hand and tugging her up too. “First we have to say goodbye to Mama,” she said, leading her sister over to the glass, and putting her hand on it demonstratively.  
Hope copied her. Looking in on their mama, her face fell, and she leaned her head against it too, staring. “We can't just leave her here,” she mumbled.

Grace frowned for a second, then shook her head. “No, it's okay, remember?” She petted her hand along the window, as if it was fabric she was smoothing down. She tried to make her voice light, important. “The crystal'll protect her. Keep her safe here.”  
“Protect her,” Hope repeated, as if trying to believe it.  
She nodded encouragingly. “Right.” She looked back, and down, at her mother's face again. She imagined a small smile there instead of the nothing-expression it’d settled into; her dusty clothes replaced with beautiful dresses, like the princesses and angels in the stories had. “You're someplace happier now,” Grace said, out loud but quietly, like she was afraid of waking her mother up. “I love you.”

“I love you, Mama,” Hope said next to her. Tears fell down her face, staining the floor, but when Grace took her hand and led her away from the glass box she went without pulling or even looking up.

*

Outside, Grace sat down with their backs to the slowly-warming glass window-walls and asked to borrow Hope's notebook. She nodded her thanks and quickly flipped to the back, then unzipped both the messenger bag and her old school backpack, laying all the things inside them out carefully. Writing them down and packing them back up, all of them in the messenger bag now, one by one. It was heavy. It felt like not nearly enough at the same time. “We’ll have to be a bit more careful,” she said.  
Hope pressed into her side, and Grace hugged her with one arm, feeling older than she ever had before.

The desert was glowing the grey-blue of dawn. Both of the girls trekked across the smooth blown-sand parking lot, and then climbed up onto the highway again.  
They paused a moment at the top of the road, their heads tipped back. The sky seemed like an enormous blue bowl tipped above them.  
After most of their lives in the City, it was still surprising to see the aftermath of stars. There was a glow at the edge of the world, creeping up into the clouds; the sun fat and warm-looking as a new ember close to the horizon line.

  
_ East, _ Grace thought. She held up her hand, lining up her knuckles with the light. Against the sun.  
Beside her, Hope did the same. She was still sniffling.  
When Grace reached out her other hand, her sister took it and held on tight.

-

-_End of "Pt. II: The Desert"-_


End file.
